Hope is not an empty word for Yavuz Ekinci. A book by the Turkish-Kurdish writer was recently confiscated for alleged terrorist propaganda and he was sentenced to eighteen months in prison on probation for a tweet. The morning after the election in Turkey, he reported from Istanbul, where he was deployed as an election worker: "I had dreamed of a country where there would be no more prey and no hunters," he writes. "But today I woke up with the oppressive feeling of being prey. Instead of blaming individuals, we should analyze where we have made mistakes. There is little time left until the run-off election. We should regain hope."
Karen Krüger
Editor in the feuilleton.
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"Umut" – "hope", many are now clinging to it, and "Umut" was also a leitmotif of this choice, which was not unjustly called a fateful choice. For the first time, it seemed possible that Erdoğan's 21-year rule would be ended. That Turkey votes for democracy and against autocracy, or, as it was said everywhere there: for reason, love, morality and against corruption, hatred, madness. It did not succeed – and this is not only devastating news for the democratic forces and the countless Turkish exiles who hoped to be able to return to their homeland perhaps as early as this week. It is also a blow to the regime's thousands of political prisoners who, like the patron of culture Osman Kavala and the politician Selahattin Demirtas, have been waiting for years to be released. "I have visited the two and I assume that after Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu's victory, it will not be long before they are released," Turkish-Kurdish writer and president of PEN International, Burhan Sönmez, said on Sunday in a Zoom conversation with this newspaper that he conducted from Ankara.
The mother also said: Enough!
Before becoming a writer, Sönmez was a human rights lawyer. He was arrested several times in Turkey and was so badly injured by police officers in 1996 that he went to the UK for security and medical treatment. It was only after ten years that he was able to return and now lives in Cambridge and Istanbul. He was recently in Ankara because of the death of his mother. She, a practicing Muslim and a ninety-year-old woman stuck in tradition who could not read or write, had always voted for Erdoğan. "But this time she wanted to give her vote to the opposition. She had had enough of Erdoğan's authoritarian style and language, of the corruption that is the norm in AKP circles. She said, 'Enough is enough.'"
She felt the same way as many people in Turkey. Despite state repression and nationalist propaganda, despite the many election gifts, and despite the fact that Erdoğan was almost constantly seen on television, 44.88 percent of voters voted for Kılıçdaroğlu – this alone shows how well-founded the hope for change was and is. After the closing of the polling stations, Erdoğan's challenger had repeatedly called for the ballot boxes not to be left out of sight before the counting protocols had been drawn up. The state-run Anadolu news agency claimed early on that Erdoğan was clearly ahead, although other sources contradicted this. It is considered a tactic of the AKP to first feed ballot boxes from party strongholds into the projections so that the victory of the ruling party seems inevitable. The aim is to discourage the opposition and influence international reporting. Election observers also reported that there had been systematic objections to ballot boxes with a lead for Kılıçdaroğlu. In such a case, the protocol requires that the counting be carried out again. In some municipalities, the counting was therefore repeated up to eleven times. The election result was correspondingly delayed.
Burhan Sönmez also said yesterday, during another exchange on the day after the election, that he would not give up hope. "We live in a society that is divided in the middle. The language of hatred is not conducive to the future of political and cultural life. We should continue to fight for democratic values and establish them. It's clear that we have a long decade ahead of us."