So two days have passed since Turkey’s dramatic day at the polls. One statistic that everybody can be impressed by is the turnout at around 90%. Dream on, sleepy Western democracies.
The fight broke 49.5/45% in favour of the incumbent. Teflon Tayyip looks like doing it again. Twenty years on and inflation running at 50? 70? 90%(?) still saw Erdoğan slightly short of the majority needed to deliver a knockout blow but still very much in poll position ahead of the final runoff on Sunday 28th May. Parliament, for which elections were also held on the same day, ended up still firmly in the hands of the government.
So, the opposition woke up on Monday (those that were not still on their feet guarding the ballot boxes) with a serious hangover. The Leader of the opposition, the “Turkish Gandhi”, whose party political broadcasts were filmed in the kitchen of his modest suburban home, was trying hard to be buoyant.
“Herşey iyi olacak!” declaimed a pale looking Kemal Kiliçdaroğlu. Translation ‘Everything will turn out fine.’
To his supporters, heads down, it looked like “Herşey total shite olacak.”
Erdoğan, masterful orator, working class hero with street fighting instincts, strode onto his balcony in the early hours of Monday declaiming
“We are on the balcony. Somebody else is in the kitchen!”
Ouch!
A despondent Kiliçdaroğlu was left holding his onions, which had formed centrepiece in his attack speeches. “1 kg of onions now 30 lira! Who can afford that?” he had been wont to thunder in a mildly reasonable sort of thunder.
But it ain’t over till the fat lady sings as the unwoke expression goes. There is still the runoff and although the gap looks unreachable there is an enigma, a wild card, a joker in the pack, a loose cannon in the shape of the 5.2% of votes cast for, well an onion. The big onion! The candidate knocked in the first round is one Sinan Oğan. Can it be a coincidence that when you contract S and Oğan you get Soğan, the Turkish word for…yes, onion!
Can it be a sign? I am no mystic flower but this could be a secret sign that the ultra -nationalist followers’ votes will go over to Onion Lover Kiliçdaroğlu, enabling him to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Or am I reading too much into what is really just a little lexical coincidence?
You can anyway be sure that fevered discussions are going on in nargile fumed rooms. Plans of a Cunningness that even Baldrick could not conceive of are being hatched. Plans more cunning than any dreamed up at a cunning fox’s convention at the finals of World’s Most Cunning Plan Championships.
Mr Oğan himself has more layers than a prize-winning onion; academic, financier, ultra nationalist, secularist, anti-terrorist, Kemalist, ejected from the Nationalist party but still passionately of it. Not easy to guess which way he will go.
The price of this particular onion is also going to go waaaaay beyond 30 liras, a juicy ministry or 3 and not the Ministry of Onions at that. He also has a red line about support for terrorism, which may or may not affect the support of many Kurdish people. It is not clear.
Actually NOTHING IS CLEAR! Istanbul is the heir of Byzantium whence we get the expression “of Byzantine complexity”! 600 years is clearly a short time in Turkish politics.
So, settle back for the next installment. Mr Oğan is set to announce in a few days whither he will point his supporters, whom he claims are the most loyal and devoted of any ı.e. they are biddable.
Mr Kiliçdaroğlu, who is 74 and has not won an election yet is drinking at the Last Chance Saloon.
I wish him well but as Washington Analyst Soner Çağaptay said “In Vegas you do not bet against the House and in Turkey you do not bet against Erdoğan.” So I will keep my wallet in my pocket.
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Footnote; I watched the election from the most delightful Arcadian Paradise in Turkey if not the World. It is an Air BnB farmhouse run by lovely couple Doğan and Nicola. It is way up in the mountains above Fethiye and although you won’t find a swimming pool or other accoutrements of a villa holiday. You will find the bird song, goat bells, the fragrance of meadow flowers and the freedom to snip your salad leaves from the best vegetable garden I have ever seen.
Those looking for a retreat will love it
https://www.facebook.com/tranquilhighlandretreat?mibextid=ZbWKwL
Great post Chris. As the French would say, “l’histoire se course”……”the plot thickens”.
I’m also wondering Chris whether the play on words has bypassed the many I’d not the few……Sinan Ogan sort of runs something like “shenanigans” when translated!!