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Financial Times gazetesi, Türkiye'de “yeni muhafazakar
modernite”nin artan ağırlığına dikkat çekerken “Hilal
yükseliyor” ifadesini kullandı.
Kritik bir seçimin eşiğindeki Türkiye'de “hilalin
yükseldiği” yorumu yapıldı. Muhalefetin başarısızlığının
AK Parti'nin olduğundan güçlü görünmesini sağladığını
öne süren gazete, “Sayın Erdoğan, popülarizm ve
alternatiflerden duyulan hayal kırıklığı dalgasında sörf
yapabilir ancak buna hakim olabileceğini henüz göstermiş
değil” görüşünü dile getirdi.
Financial Times gazetesi, Vincent Boland imzalı “Hilal
yükseliyor” başlıklı haber-yorumunda Türkiye'nin hızlı
değişen bir toplum olduğunu, Kemalistlerin modernleşmede
başarısız kaldığını öne sürdü. Türkiye'de yaşanan göç
olayının etkilerine işaret eden gazete, Türkiye'de
Kemalizm'in “katı” unsurlarını reddeden yeni bir
“muhafazakar modernite”nin ortaya çıktığını yazdı.
Yeni “muhafazakar modernite”nin merkezinin Kayseri
olduğunu öne süren gazete, “bu yeni burjuvazinin
şaşırtıcı yönü, zenginliğidir” ifadesini kullandı.
Bu yeni burjuvazinin, siyasi gücü bulunmadığı için AK
Parti'yi bu gücü elde etme yolu gibi gördüğünü savunan
gazete, kökleri açık bir biçimde İslamcı olan AK
Parti'nin ise bürokrasi, yargı, üniversite ve ordudaki
elite ulaşabilmek için adapte olmayı mecbur kaldığı
görüşünü dile getirdi.
ERDOĞAN TÜRK SİYASETİNİN EN ŞANSLI POLİTİKACISI
İngiliz gazetesi, AK Parti'nin, aday listelerine daha
muhafazakar unsurlarına yer vermeyerek genç
profesyonellere yönelmesini, “partinin devlet ile
barışmakta olduğu”nun bir işareti olarak nitelendirdi.
AK Parti'nin başarılarının görmezden gelinmeyeceğini
kaydeden gazete, buna karşın Başbakan Erdoğan'ın “Türk
siyasetinin en şanslı adamı” olduğuna ilişkin kanıtların
da bulunduğunu öne sürdü.
Başbakan Erdoğan'ın “şanslı” oluşunu, rakiplerine
bağlayan gazete, Erdoğan'ın “laik merkez sağdaki
rakipleri”nin inandırıcılığını yitirdiğini belirtti.
Ancak Erdoğan için en büyük nimetin, CHP'deki
“kemikleşme” olduğunu savunan gazete, CHP'nin kentlerin
dışında bir çekiciliğinin bulunmadığını, Erdoğan'ın
“popülizmi”ne inandırıcı bir biçimde meydan okuyamadığı
görüşünü dile getirdi. Financial Times şu
değerlendirmesini yaptı:
“Siyasi analistlere göre, muhalefetin başarısızlığı
sadece hükümetin reform sicilinin daha iyi görünmesini
sağlamıyor. Aynı zamanda AKP'yi gerçekte olduğundan daha
güçlü ve sağlam gösteriyor.
Tüm başarılarına rağmen günlük ekonomi işlerinin
ehliyetli yönetimi ötesine giden bir Türkiye vizyonu
olduğunu henüz göstermiş değil. Sayın Erdoğan,
popülarizm ve alternatiflerden duyulan hayal kırıklığı
dalgasında sörf yapabilir ancak buna hakim olabileceğini
henüz göstermiş değil.”
YAZININ ORJİNALİ
Crescent rising
By Vincent Boland
Published: July 17 2007 03:00 | Last updated: July 17
2007 03:00
Aged 18, Gamze Cakir and Esra Ertas will be first-time
voters in Turkey's general election on Sunday. Yet each
has already made one of the most important decisions of
her adult life.
Ms Cakir lives in a village called Kahramanlar in the
east of the country, a region where subsistence farming
and traditional social customs shape daily life. She has
decided that, unlike her mother and sister, she will not
wear the Muslim headscarf. Ms Ertas lives 1,400km away
in Izmir, a laid-back city on the Aegean coast full of
good restaurants and palm-lined streets. She has decided
that she will wear it, probably after she finishes her
fashion studies.
"It's my choice and my family is not putting pressure on
me," says Ms Cakir, sitting with other women from the
village at their strawberry field, a business they have
set up together. Ms Ertas, attending a rally in Izmir
for the centre-right Justice and Development party
(AKP), also says her decision is her own. The AKP wants
to ease restrictions on the wearing of the headscarf in
state buildings including universities, a move she
supports but Turkey's secular institutions and political
parties oppose. "The other parties are liars," she says.
"They are not secular because they interfere with my
right to wear the headscarf."
The personal decisions of young women such as these, to
defy the conventions of their environments, have a wider
resonance for Turkish society. The election to choose a
new government was called because of a dispute,
involving all of Turkey's governing institutions, that
touches on the headscarf and its religious, political
and social significance in an officially secular country.
The outgoing government formed by the AKP, which has its
roots in political Islam, had tried to get Abdullah Gul,
foreign minister and former Islamist activist, elected
to the presidency, a symbolically secular post. The
attempt halted after the military issued an ultimatum
about a "threat to the secular republic". The generals
did not specify the threat. But as Suat Kiniklioglu, who
is standing as an AKP candidate in the election,
observes: "The only reason why [Mr Gul] did not become
president is because his wife wears the headscarf."
The casting off of traditional dress was one of the
great reforms imposed on Turkey by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk,
the nation's founder, after 1923 when the republic
emerged from the ruins of the Ottoman empire. It was a
central tenet of the push for modernity and for "the
level of contemporary civilisation" - usually
interpreted as emulating its western European
contemporaries - that Ataturk exhorted his successors to
achieve. Some 60 per cent of women still wear the
headscarf but the proportion is falling. The decisions
of the two young women indicate that in a rapidly
changing society, Turks may be discovering more than one
route to modernity.
Although Turkey is a revolutionary republic, like France
and the US, its was a revolution imposed from above. Out,
almost overnight, went the Ottoman governing system,
traditional dress, the centrality of religious customs,
the Arabic alphabet and even Ottoman aspects of the
Turkish language. In came the western weekend, the suit
and hat, the Latin alphabet, state control of the
practice of religion and equality between men and women.
Then, while Turkey remained a one-party state after the
republican period began, this revolutionary modernity
flourished. But the idea gradually began to lose its
influence, in part because, in an irony that Kemalists
do not always appreciate, it was itself left
unmodernised. The Republican People's party (CHP), which
is contesting the election as the biggest opposition
party, is the party of Ataturk and the early modernisers.
But its rigid interpretation of secularism, limited
interpretation of democracy and closeness to Turkey's
military make many uneasy.
A main reason for the failure of Kemalists to modernise
was the relative isolation of Turkey from the European
political, social and intellectual mainstream from the
1950s until the early 1980s. This isolation was
accompanied by domestic developments whose consequences
resound today more loudly than ever. In the 1950s, there
were the beginnings of mass migration from the country
to the city. This trend, which peaked in the 1970s and
1980s but still continues, has profoundly influenced the
social, political and cultural outlook of Turkey.
Istanbul had a population of about 1m in 1945; today it
has more than 12m inhabitants. Migration was driven by
the search for work or to escape rural isolation or
ethnic conflict.
When Turkey moved to multi-party politics in the late
1950s, this side of society began to find a voice. But
it came into its own as a social and political
phenomenon only in the 1980s. After a series of military
coups and the outbreak of a terrible conflict between
the state and Kurdish separatists, the government of the
late Turgut Ozal began to open up the economy and
society.
These developments together revealed the gulf between
the urban middle class and the rural masses, between the
city and the village and between the centre and the
periphery. Each has been trying to get to know the other
ever since. As Tayfun Atay, professor of ethnology at
Ankara University, says: "In Turkey today, the centre is
everywhere and everywhere is the periphery."
This process has offered millions of Turks the
opportunity to forge their own sense of modernity, one
that rejects the sternly secular elements of Kemalism
but embraces a contemporary society that allows them to
hold on to their traditional family and social networks,
religious observance and cultural conservatism. "It is
conservative modernity, modernising with tradition,
instead of top-down modernity," Prof Atay says.
The acknowledged centre of this new conservative
modernity is not the suburbs of Istanbul, though it is
there in spades, but Kayseri, a city of about 1m in
central Anatolia. A manufacturing centre, it is a
monument to Turkey's new bourgeoisie. This new Anatolian
elite is an entrepreneurial class that has flourished
since the 1980s and now forms the basis of the AKP's
support.
The Kayseri chamber of industry has 1,050 members. Most
of them are small businesses, but some are large
corporations with annual revenues of up to $2bn (£1bn,
€1.5bn), in industries ranging from cables to textiles
to food processing and furniture.
Mr Gul represents the city in parliament. As Murat Cahid
Cingi, who is a candidate in the city for the AKP in the
election, says: "Kayseri is probably the most successful
city in Turkey in the post-Ozal era."
The startling fact about this new bourgeoisie is how
wealthy it is, after 25 years of entrepreneurialism.
Tolga Ediz, an economist at Lehman Brothers, says much
of the innovation in Turkish industry in that time has
come from emerging businesses in Anatolia, not from the
dominant conglomerates of the wealthy Istanbul families.
This class lacks political power, however, and sees the
AKP as its route to acquiring it. "There is a
renegotiation of power going on between those who have
it and those who want it- and the AKP is in the middle
of that re-negotiation," Mr Ediz says.
The AKP, whose origins lie in overtly Islamist parties
that were shut down by the authorities in the 1990s, has
been forced to adapt itself to reach an accommodation
with the state elite in the bureaucracy, the judiciary,
the universities and the military. This process has
occupied almost all its time in government since it was
elected in 2002 and is only half-finished, as the clash
with the military over Mr Gul's presidential credentials
suggests.
For this election, it has purged its more reactionary
elements to distance itself from its origins, instead
promoting young professionals, many of them educated
abroad, who are attracted by its claim to be the true
voice of a democratic Turkey. Analysts say the move
suggests the party is making its peace with the state
and could herald a more constructive relationship if, as
seems likely, the party is returned to government after
the election. "The AKP elite is more interested in
infiltrating the system than in overthrowing it," says
Soli Ozel, an academic and commentator in Istanbul.
There can be no denying its successes in government -
strong economic growth, the opening of membership talks
with the European Union and a willingness to unfreeze
some ancient state policies, such as over Cyprus. Yet
there is also evidence that Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the
party's mercurial leader and prime minister, is the
luckiest man in Turkish politics.
Mr Erdogan is lucky, most of all, in his opponents. His
rivals on the secular centre-right have lost their
credibility with voters after a series of inter-party
rifts, while other leaders along Turkey's predominantly
rightwing political spectrum are either militant
nationalists or outright xenophobes. The greatest boon
for the prime minister, however, has been the
ossification of the CHP on the left. Although it stands
to win about 22 per cent of the vote on Sunday (see
chart), the party has little appeal outside its urban
core and has been unable to mount a credible challenge
to Mr Erdogan's populism.
The opposition's failure, political analysts say, not
only makes the government's reform record look better
than it otherwise might. It makes the AKP look more
powerful and entrenched than it really is. For all its
successes, the AKP still has to show that it has a
vision of Turkey that extends beyond the competent day-to-day
management of the economy. Mr Erdogan may be surfing a
wave of populism and disillusion with the alternatives,
but he has yet to show that he can be the master of it. |
