Their biggest fiasco to be

It was Republic Day on Thursday, Oct. 29. I remembered this great quote of İsmet İnönü, the second president of Turkey, that has been carved in my memory. “My biggest victory is my fiasco in these elections…”

Turkey had started its transition to multi-party life, to the march of real democracy, with these honest elections held in 1950. 

İnönü is on this side, the person who came to power with a one-party election, who knew how to leave with a multi-party election, who is able to digest this and write a victory legend out of this…

On the other side, there are those who came to power with multi-party elections, then downgraded the regime into a one-party one, those who cannot even stomach the coalition message that came out of the ballot box… 

Do you know why the symbol of the republic is still Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and İsmet İnönü? This is the reason why…

It is a virtue to come to power in democracy; however, knowing how to leave is an even bigger virtue. 
The person who bears the shame of issuing the oppressive and cruel law called the Law on the Maintenance of Order (Takrir-i Sükûn) is İnönü… 

But he is also the bearer of the honor that transformed our country to a multi-party regime. 

This second İnönü has remained in our hearts… 

What I want to say to you, dear esteemed president, is that to be the president of the people, to turn the hate of the 60 percent of the people into love, to be remembered positively in the future, it is still not too late…

Please think of this on the evening of Nov. 1… 

What comes to my mind when the republic is mentioned 

It is the egalitarian education that brought poor Süleyman Demirel from the village of İslamköy, the middle-class Turgut Özal from Malatya, the poor Tayyip Erdoğan from Istanbul’s Kasımpaşa to the top of the state… 
It is the just administration that opens the way wide open to the poorest slum kids to politics, to earning money, to art and to sports.

It is the beautiful characteristics of Turkey that distinguishes it from other Muslim countries.  

In our eyes and in our hearts 

He says the symbol of the republic is “Aksaray,” the Presidential Palace at Beştepe, Ankara.  

I say: No it is not, my dear brother. You can repeat it as many times as you want to; it will not be. 

What you force people to see cannot be forced into their hearts… 

As a Turkish person who is proud of his Ottoman past and as “a child of the republic era,” when the might of the Ottoman is mentioned, Topkapı [Palace] comes to my mind…

When you say “Dolmabahçe” [Palace], my vocabulary brings up “sultanate.”

What about Aksaray? When Aksaray is mentioned, the only word that comes to my mind is “Dolmabahçe.”

In that symbol, I only see hubris, splendor, oppression, cruelty, injustice, tastelessness and nothing else. 

And when I look at it, I understand that the symbols of the republic are not those that are forced into our eyes to see but those that lie in our hearts with love…

Neither the giant palace can take the place of Çankaya and the old parliament building, nor can the bad replica in Çamlıca be anything like Süleymaniye [Mosque]…  

The hubris monuments of this interim regime will fade out against the modesty of the Ottoman and the republic…