Then comes a third party out of nowhere to overturn the chessboard. He says he does not like the game and one of the players. No one can do anything because the man is armed. Now no one knows how and what kind of a game will be set up again and who will be the likely players. What is ironic and disturbing is that the players -- less the likely winner and some of the spectators -- accept this unlikely situation. Sportsmanship is altogether abandoned when they see that there is a way out of defeat though someone’s disrupting the game. Only a few people stood up and defended fair play and sportsmanship. This is a discouraging situation with regards to the competitive spirit and fairness (rule of law) taking root in Turkey.
The above allegory is a sad description of the current state of politics in our country. Now that the election date has been hastily set for the sake of returning to the game, new rules have to be made. The question is whether the players will make up the rules of the new game or whether strongmen will do it for them once more with the excuse that the players may do wrong and should be protected from their own mistakes. This is another irony, because all of the rules and procedures of the national and presidential elections were concocted and put into effect by the strongmen of the 1980s. Now the same strongmen are exerting themselves “to save the country” from the results of a legal system they themselves set in motion. And many of our parties and citizens are convinced that they should be “saved.”
This culture of salvation is not haphazard. It has developed throughout centuries filtering down from a paternalistic and hierarchical relationship between an omnipotent state and weak society. This weakness has led to dependency of the people on the state and development of a clientelist pattern whereby people expect everything from the state in return for obedience and submission. The end result of this relationship has been lack of progress or revolutionary change. The state decided how the people would live, think and behave. In the end an infantile society emerged that clears everything with the state while the state dictates its preferences as well as the pace and nature of change. This led to a corporatist system where powers and social cohorts were fused, or better, wanted to be fused.
The dictum that “we are a classless nation with no privileges that set us apart” was an official lie that we tended or pretended to believe. The second problem was the fusion of powers disregarding the constitutional command to the contrary. The executive (government) emerges from the legislature, so they are in fact one. Lower courts are a part of the Ministry of Justice that makes them a part of the executive branch of the government. The president of the republic -- who constitutes the highest echelon of the executive -- appoints most of the judges of the higher courts and members of the Higher Education Board (YÖK). Hence separation of powers is an illusion in the Turkish administrative/legal system. This fusion creates such constipation in the political sphere that neither sociological-cultural diversity can be acknowledged to add dynamism to society nor can creative breakthroughs take place through competitive pluralism.
As if these structural discrepancies were not enough, there are obstacles to fair competition, representation and participation in the electoral system. The 10 percent election threshold for parliamentary representation devoiced millions of voters (the votes of 45 percent of the electorate were squandered in the 2002 elections) and unfairly inflate those who pass the barrier leading to monopolization of power, which the makers of the last constitution dreaded the most. Our laws are inimical to election alliances amongst political parties with the fear that undesired (ethnic or religious) parties could infiltrate Parliament. Thirdly candidates are selected by party bosses (not to say “leaders”) and do not reflect popular choice or local needs/preferences. Now despite the keen friction between the existing parties in the Parliament, they have concurred to change the rules to make it harder to run as independent candidates. How can then we expect democracy from a fundamentally undemocratic system that is infested with authoritarianism at the legal, procedural and organizational level? But more importantly, the soul of the system is not democratic and spiritual transplantation has not yet been invented. All that remains to be said about democracy is just trivial rhetoric.
Benzer Haberler 
