the election Campaign is, as usual in recent years, a one-sided affair. AKP candidates are favoured both in the public and other media and the opposition representatives can not always expect protection from the order’s guardian when they get accosted in the streets and squares. The opposition parties share out their sticky notes and tape their simple posters, which soon blows away or torn down without any police intervention.
is the solid set in glass and steel, or on the plastschabrak that covers the entire façade. In Istanbul depicts the AKP posters of president Recep Tayyip Erdogan in pairs with his former prime minister Binali Yildirim, who lost the job last year, when Turkey switched to the presidential system. Despite support from the party failed Yildirim this year to become mayor of the city of Izmir, and is now carried forth in every way. The opposition would like to make ammunition of the islamisten Yildirims vast fortune and of his son’s debauchery in the taverns and casinos, but such a thing is too dangerous nowadays.
There is something strange with all the concentrations, pharaonic portraits on härskarpartiets champions. It takes a little time before the viewer will come on what it is: Despite the fact that millions of people each day passes the appropriations, so is the same as when they were set up. Not a bad word, no scribbles and no small black moustache, which in countries where policy live.
It’s not just the pundits, politicians and journalists who have fallen silent. The man in the street is as quiet as a mouse. Metin Bakkalci, a leading Turkish human rights defender, put it this way during a seminar in the Swedish parliament the other day:
– There is no civilian space left in the society.
, for a change,, it is not only people who are scared. The regime is scared, and the measure of its concern should be to visit a traditional market. We visit the compact AKP-friendly neighbourhood of Kasimpasa on the Golden horn to the eastern shores. There, at the side of the usual sparsely visited fruktstånden, runs a long queue to a table where bureaucrats offer the same oranges and cucumbers for a much lower price and the dots of the lucky ones on the listings. It is the government that has gone into grönsaksbranschen with paniksubventioner.
Even if the Turkish arbetslöner is still or shrink, so must the farmers – with a currency that has lost almost 50 percent against the dollar in one year – import of chemical fertilizers, insecticides and machinery from outside. The price of food has risen 32 per cent since the summer.
, most of them typical AKP voters, looking very askance at the regime’s charm offensive.
– How is it supposed to be clear to us if the government sells below cost?
Citronförsäljaren M. tells us that he has fixed expenses, packaging, electricity, fees to the town and a delivery boy:
– Even if I refrain from all profit so I have to pay these things. You do not need to be a professor in economics to understand that this is not sustainable. We may hope that they will stop with it after the election, otherwise I’ll get hit again.
Now, asked Erdogan to face the voters ‘ verdict
the Regime, while the turks, has only one opponent who does not let himself be silenced, and it is the Turkish lira. When it speaks plainly parodied also Erdogan. The president makes his tirade against the ”international leagues speculating against the lira”, but he has had to give in and had to let the riksbank increase the repo rate.
is dangerous, and the turks who have money are buying gold and euros. Erdogan is furious at the united states, who crossed his plans in Syria, but there is much to suggest that he will be forced to humble themselves and ask for help from the president of the united states Donald Trump. The other day, when Erdogan condemned Trump’s decision to recognise Israel’s claim on the Golan heights, collapsed, the lira further.
Erdogan during the election campaign, taken to the extreme högerpositioner, and the opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu has followed him in the wake of a kuriöst way. Erdogan, who rules with the help of the right-wing nationalist party MHP, recently suggested to Alpaslan Türkes (1917-1997) högerextremisternas legendary leader must be given the name of a new university. Kilicdaroglu, whose party CHP is a member of the socialist international and who, in their time terroriserades of Türkes, ”the Gray wolves”, applauded the proposal and made himself publicly the infamous vargtecknet.
to Kilicdaroglus ”to the right swing” is he has given up all hope to be able to invite Erdogan’s opposition, and instead trying to signal to the högernationalisterna in the state apparatus to his CHP, as well as the extremists of the MHP, could be to some extent due to the AKP.
Sunday’s kommunval is the last election before the next presidential elections in 2023. Thousands of international observers will be in place, one of them is the left party leader Jonas Sjöstedt. An activist from the pro-kurdish party HDP, whose leaders are in prison, says to dagens nyheter:
– There is no free choice when so many elected officials are in prison and where the media is closed to those who dare to criticise the regime. But we must still participate, in order to keep the hope flame alive in this dark time.
