Jay Nordlinger, a senior editor of National Review and a book fellow at the National Review Institute, asked, “Who originated that phrase, ‘smack of firm government’?” And he answers, “Donald McLachlan, a Scottish journalist (1908–71) who was the founding editor of the Sunday Telegraph. The Wikipedia entry for him says, ‘He originated the phrase ‘the smack of firm government’ in a leader of 3 January 1956 criticizing the premiership of Anthony Eden.”
A quick search on Google shows that the phrase has been used mostly in the analyses of the Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher administrations in the United States and the United Kingdom, respectively. One such article, titled “The smack of firm government” by Peter A. Hall in the New York Times, says: “Theirs was the language of 19th-century individualism. The Victorian values that Mrs. Thatcher so proudly espouses closely resemble the calls to family obligation, patriotic duty and hometown loyalty that President Reagan often invokes. After two decades of the ‘permissive society,’ there were overtones of religious fundamentalism in the messages of both leaders.”
That, in my humble opinion, explains what the Turkish voters have found in President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AK Party) for the last two decades. With the election victory he had last night, he started his (alas) last term at the helm of government. Apparently, the voters still remember the decades wasted with parliamentary quarrels, coalitions whose average life span was around 14 months and government purses screaming in the “need for 70 cents.”
It also shows us that for a long time to come, Turkish voters are not going to tolerate any possibility of what Mrs. Thatcher used to call “wasting time by having any internal arguments.” The short six months of the opposition alliance proved that the political habitat in Türkiye may not be conducive for political coalitions. Mr. Kılıçdaroğlu’s six-way coalition would be difficult to manage for even the most skillful mavens. His last-minute maneuvers to win a couple of million votes cast for the third candidate, Sinan Oğan, clearly showed people that a president who would not see any harm in signing two memoranda of understanding with two different sets of allies would soon lead the country in a merry pretty dance! They said, “Thanks, but no thanks.”
Had the Republican People's Party (CHP) dared to face Erdoğan’s AK Party alone but with a political, economic and diplomatic program with both feet on the ground, declaring the ministers that would be appointed right after the election, I still don’t believe it would have won the election, but I think the party would have had a fighting chance. Since the majority of the people overwhelmingly endorsed the constitutional amendment changing the parliamentary system to the presidential regime, the CHP should not busy itself with yet another constitutional amendment and similar pies in the sky. The CHP brass never trusted people’s acumen in their endorsing the presidential system; they assumed that we, the people, accepted it simply to keep Erdoğan in power for another term. Not only the existing CHP team, but almost all the founders of that party and the republic have not trusted the ingenuity of the people. They always saw us as a herd to be herded.
Well, with that election smack, we, the people, showed how determined we are.
