As if a political leader has the luxury of not getting the message of the ballot box, once the elections are over this message-receiving recitation takes to the stage. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been receiving messages from the ballot boxes for some time already. Interestingly, the prime minister is most calm in the initial hours of a crisis and "receives the message of a real drop in public support for his party rather maturely," but by the time he develops an aggressive policy the initial heat of the crisis is no longer there. The prime minister's famous "balcony speech" on the night of June 22, 2007, is still remembered. It is remembered because it has not been actualized. If it had been, its actualized version would overshadow its spoken version. Action is always more powerful than promises. The balcony speech is still a powerful image in our memories. It was not replaced by another speech, not to mention any action.
On Sunday night the prime minister made a simple speech. He said he had gotten the message from the ballot box. He did not enter into political word games to declare the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) a great winner in the elections. He was open to the point of admitting that he was not happy with the outcome and that he would study the results to see the reasons for the drop in public support for his party. The message the prime minister received, in short, was "Work harder!"
How did other political leaders interpret the messages they received from the ballot boxes?
Republican People's Party (CHP) leader Deniz Baykal's message-receiving faculty is dysfunctional. Whatever the result of the elections is, the only message he takes from it is the same -- "Hold tight!" If the CHP reads the relative success of its İstanbul candidate, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, as a message it will be making a further mistake. Kılıçdaroğlu played the game "dirty." He and his team worked hard to find and, in some cases, forge corruption cases in the Ankara and İstanbul municipalities. This kind of opposition certainly disturbs the ruling party, but it also destroys the soul of democracy. This is not strategy; it is merely deception. Such tactics may have worked on one or two occasions, but this does not guarantee that they will work next time. Kılıçdaroğlu made the first mistake on election night by declaring that the election results were being played with by the government and that when 90 percent of the ballots were counted it would be clear that he had been elected as the mayor of İstanbul. His aides asked the CHP cadres to "keep an eye on the ballot boxes."
Turkey knows that at least two national agencies are collecting data at the ballot boxes for the media and that the Supreme Election Board (YSK) has its own mechanisms to guarantee that there is no mismanagement in the counting of the votes. The CHP says they are counting the votes on their own. This means that other political parties are counting, too. Who do you think you are cheating under these conditions? If the CHP's İstanbul and Ankara candidates have doubts in their minds about the counting of the votes, I have doubts about what happened in Antalya and about the electricity cuts in Çankaya. In the end, the CHP won in Çankaya, no?
Did Devlet Bahçeli get a message from the ballot box? He had gotten the message already in 2007 -- and in 2004 and 2002: "Go!" He has not listened. The AK Party lost a record amount of votes in Sunday's local elections. These voters were looking for another party to support and it seems that they didn't like Bahçeli's Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). It is well known that during times of international economic crisis, left-wing and nationalist parties win new ground and centralist parties lose public support. And this is what happened; the AK Party lost public support and the CHP and MHP won.
The message I got from the ballot box is this: "Never arrange a flight on the day of an election."
