Beware! This is a most important problem!

We stand face to face with a very important problem within the context of the defence of democracy, human rights and individual freedoms in general. If we are unable to solve this problem, let alone defending democracy, human rights and individual freedoms, we will be denied the possibility of even retaining the necessary concepts to speak about them (e.g. the claim that “Press freedom criteria are Western-centred”).
 
Up against a wall
This problem, which has been with us for fifteen years but has now attained a far greater importance, has its origins in the political Islam represented in the AKP reaching the conclusion that, “We cannot win a fair election held freely under normal conditions.” As I have previously stressed, political Islam has run into a majority wall that it is unable to persuade to participate in the project. The AKP leadership first came to the realisation of this situation in the June elections. With them being forced to take last-minute measures in breach of the law in the referendum, it has sunk home to them with finality that they cannot win a fair election held freely under normal conditions.
Under this situation, the political Islam represented in the AKP will try to move forward with three tactics. The first will be the endeavour to conceal the effect of this wall on the ballot box and win elections by fraud once more. The second, with a view to preparing here and now the forces that will suppress the ensuing objections when this fraud is committed, it is accelerating the polarisation of society on the basis of political and cultural preferences, life styles and religious affiliations and thus trying to strengthen the loyalty of its own base and stoke up its anger.
The AKP and political Islam can no longer make do with the state of emergency and a Supreme Electoral Council that is faithful to the AKP. The AKP regime wishes to conceal improprieties, close the door to objection and ordain vote counting processes and election results on-site by making it hard for party witnesses to function at ballot boxes and making polling station chairs civil servants. Hence, the AKP regime is also turning elections, like parliament, into a procedure that will forever approve the AKP regime and a kind of game in which the results are known in advance. These two tactics invite the thought that much darker days await the country’s political environment.
 
The third tactic
The third tactic involves using foreign policy to support the first two tactics. However, this tactic, contrary to political Islam’s opinion leaders’ leadership fantasies, is greatly reducing the room for manoeuvre in terms of economic and political preferences by isolating the country in the international arena, breaking it away from its allies and placing it in relationships that it lacks the resources to handle.
For example, AKP Turkey dreams of leading the Turkish and Islamic world against the West. But, in the context of this dream, in terms of meeting the country’s financial, technological and energy needs, efforts to clash with the West force it to turn its face to centres like Russia, Iran and China. As such, a series of deadlocks have begun to emerge.
For example, there is no realistic answer to the question of, “In a Turkey whose military structure has been shaped in accordance with US-NATO standards and which needs to get a loan from Russia for the S-400s on their way from Russia, what technological foundation and financial resources will the restructuring of the military be based on?”
With the AKP, dreaming of being the leader of the Islamic and Turkish world, turning its face to the East, it finds itself, as attendance at the last Organisation of Islamic Cooperation meeting also showed, confronted by an alliance that is taking shape in the Arab World between Egypt – Saudi Arabia – the UAE and Israel. On the other hand, according to certain analyses in the Russian press, Russia and Iran are cooperating to check Turkey’s influence in Azerbaijan. The prospect of the New Silk Road project passing to Europe along the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway is causing concern to Russia in particular. In short, AKP Turkey is attempting to draw close to forces that have been trying to restrict and channel it in the competition over a sphere of influence from the Turkic republics to Syria and Iraq, and which have been pretty successful in this regard until now. These developments invite the thought that, in an environment in which competition is gradually intensifying between the great powers, dark days await the country.