Dani Rodrik, an award-winning economist at Harvard, is the son-in-law of retired General Çetin Doğan, one of the victims of sham trials against the military masterminded by Gülenists.
We have not seen a bashing of the West from Turkish leadership during the electoral campaign period, a German businessman living in Turkey told me. When he shared this observation with a Turkish interlocutor, the response was, “We can no longer afford it.”
“In all the songs I listen to, everything reminds me of you.”
Economic and foreign policy will be the two top priority areas that will require immediate attention.
Since the June 2015 general elections, after which a ceasefire between the government and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) ended, the Kurdish issue has been confined to an all-out military, political and psychological campaign against the PKK inside and outside Turkey. That campaign has also been waged against what the government sees as the PKK’s political affiliations.
To have a healthy analysis of election results you first have to have reliable input. The controversy over claims of vote irregularities is still in the air and it is the responsibility of the governing party as well as opposition parties to clear the air.
What do the election results tell us about democratic maturity in Turkey? Despite the unfair nature of the campaign period, the opposition has accepted the election results and said vote irregularities are not at the point of changing the outcome. This is the most important sign of a functioning democracy.
A significant portion of CHP supporters live in their comfort zones, don’t bother going to other parts of their home city and commute between big metropoles and coastal holiday towns, never laying foot in a central Anatolian town. Frequenting people like them, they end up thinking everyone is like them. But they have to come to terms with the fact that the outcome actually reflects the roughly 70 to 30 percent division in Turkey.
Turkey is among the many regional and international players that pursued mistaken policies in Syria, fueling the civil war in Syria that has led to the biggest refugee and displacement crisis of our time.
