Ballots have the final word in Turkey

On Tuesday, all political parties submitted their deputy candidate lists for the June 7 elections to the Supreme Election Board (YSK), which has kindled election excitement. Soon the parties will begin to introduce their candidates to the public. This excitement is a great acquisition for Turkey, because although free elections have been held in Turkey since 1946, they were either held only as a matter of form or the elected governments were unfortunately hindered by institutional bureaucracy and the army. During the 1960 coup, the Prime Minister Adnan Menderes and two ministers, Fatin Rüştü Zorlu and Hasan Polatkan, were hanged, even though they were guilty of committing no crime, while the Armenian deputies of the Democrat Party, including Zakar Tarver were tortured and killed. Afterwards, the forces of tutelage, which wished to silence the public with institutional fascism, continued to stage a coup every 10 years. They blocked democratically elected and strong leaders with dark plots. The latest coup was staged on Feb. 28, 1997, which is quite recent.

When looked at from a historical perspective, it can be seen that the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) exerted great efforts in order to prevent tutelage forces from seizing authority. It discovered coup plans, survived the status quo media's campaigns to discredit the party and memorandums issued by the army in 2007. It also narrowly escaped from being shut down itself. Particularly after Jan. 3, 2003, when the reconciliation process to end the conflicts with the PKK, which was the greatest camouflage the military/civilian bureaucratic tutelary order was hiding behind, the alliance of tutelage started its final plan to discredit the-then prime minister and current president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and overthrow the government with all its efforts. Because it was known that a new constitution could not be instituted if the reconciliation process was blocked, the government would lose its political authority and the country would be dragged into chaos. The superstructure of the Gülen Movement also provided support to this alliance - they even attempted a coup with the Dec. 17 and Dec. 25 operations in 2013 by showing groundless claims of corruption as the excuse, all carried out by their members with positions in the judiciary and police department.

They also tried to turn the Gezi Park protests, in which young protestors resisted police violence into a civil war (it turned out that the members of the "parallel structure" were responsible for this violence). Lastly, on Oct. 6-8, 2014, the oppression that the white Turks imposed on the PKK and its political wing, the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), yielded results, and another civil war was rehearsed, which claimed the lives of 52 citizens. The imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan kept Kurds away from street demonstrations during the Gezi Park protests, but he could not prevent the start of this operation instigated by the Kobani incidents. But the violent incidents ceased thanks to a call from him.

Some intellectuals and elite media outlets that have foreign contacts attempted to legitimize these extraordinary situations by suggesting that Turkey is ruled by a dictatorship. They have tried to influence the three critical elections held in 2014 and 2015, since the army cannot overtly stage a coup anymore, and a postmodern coup with the help from the media or judiciary such as the Feb. 28 coup, does not seem possible now. For this reason, a series of extraordinary events commenced, beginning in early 2013. Recently, a terrorist organization that had been inactive for a long time, the Revolutionary People's Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C), initiated violent activities in order to create chaos before the upcoming June 7 elections. And unfortunately, the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) and other parties did not even condemn the attacks properly. While the state and government authorities were present at the funeral of slain Prosecutor Mehmet Selim Kiraz, who was taken hostage and killed at his office by the DHKP-C, nobody from the opposition attended the funeral. The CHP and its media romanticized the incident and represented the militants as warriors of freedom and justice.

The June 7 elections are approaching in this atmosphere. The public is the guarantee of the system. People are accustomed to such provocations and therefore they do not allow the manipulation of popular will. These elections appear to be the same, too.