Millimetric election engineering...

As Turkey drifts toward the abyss at one of the sharpest turns in the history of the Republic, the regime's security bureaucracy and judicial apparatus have gone after the laughter rising from the Harbiye open-air stage.

The detention of comedian Deniz Göktaş at the airport in handcuffs, followed by his hasty arrest, using the jokes he made in his “Ölü Deniz” (Dead Sea) show—which has been watched by more than 10 million people on digital platforms—as a pretext, should by no means be read as a legal excess or a judicial measure.

Let us state it upfront: the accusation of Deniz Göktaş for publicly inciting the people to hatred and hostility and insulting the President is not merely an effort to silence a humor artist; this move is a millimetric step in political engineering taken by the Palace to manage the deepening economic and social crisis in the country.

To put it bluntly, we are facing a structure burning with the fear of losing its power, and the whole issue is knotted right here.

We can say that the government has two fundamental goals far beyond the justifications it presents to the public.

The first is the classic approach of political Islamists: to use religious rhetoric to prevent economic and social disintegration and to fortify their base!

The deep crisis the country is in, the fire in the kitchen, the cost of living, and the ever-increasing poverty have led to a serious disintegration in the government's core base.

This was clearly revealed by the latest research from Metropol.

According to 75 percent of our people, the economy is getting worse.

In other words, it is not just the opposition that is complaining.

The rate of AKP supporters within this is 53.4 percent.

One in every two people...

67.4 percent of the voters of the MHP, the other component of the People's Alliance, share the same view.

It is clear that these and similar research results have caused alarm bells to ring in the Palace. Neither Trump coming to Ankara with plane engines nor hosting the NATO summit is enough to save the situation.

It is obvious that the spear no longer fits in the sack.

The government's concern is to stop the social disintegration caused by the deep economic crisis that the country is in, which has now become impossible to hide and unsustainable. The massive inflationary wave experienced in every field, from fuel to bread, from rent to electricity and water bills, has caused such a major crack for the first time in the core base it has been testing for loyalty for over twenty years.

The fire in the kitchen has turned into an unquenchable anger in the conservative fortresses of Anatolia. The ground beneath the ruling bloc is shifting.

Let us emphasize that the fact that Deniz Göktaş's jokes about sacred texts and religious practices were cherry-picked and presented as a “national threat” through 185 artificial CİMER applications serves exactly this purpose.

We saw that instead of discussing the economic wreckage, the government artificially brought the perception that “Our religion and our sacred values are being lost” to the stage. The fact that the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) targeted “the mockery of sacred values under the guise of humor” in its Friday sermon, as if acting in coordination with the judiciary, is the most concrete proof of this!

In short, the message given to its own base is: “You may be hungry, you may remain poor, but look, they are attacking our spirituality; therefore, we must unite around the flag and faith.” The masses that have begun to disintegrate are being redesigned in an artificial culture war laboratory and are being aligned along the axis of faith.

Besides, the boy said it himself, that he comes from an Alevi and communist family...

Isn't that enough, what more should he say! To press the nerve endings of the Sunni base, which constitutes the vast majority of its own voters, through this sentence...

Could there be anything better than this?

Part of the calculation is this.

The second, and perhaps most vital goal for the long-term survival of the government, is to consolidate the “untouchable, uncriticizable” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan cult, which is shaken every day and worn out in its base and in the international arena...

We know that the survival of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes depends on the thickness of the armor of “inaccessibility” and “infallibility” around the leader figure. However, the naked reality revealed by the latest local elections and polls shows that the spell of this charismatic authority has been broken.

The hegemony established by the government on the street, in the media, and ultimately on the comedy stages is being deconstructed.

Humor, by its nature, is the greatest enemy of authority. Authoritarian regimes fear a comedian's joke or a cartoonist's lines more than tanks, rifles, or military conspiracies.

Because humor says the king is naked; it shatters the halo of sanctity woven around the leader with a single sentence.

Deniz Göktaş's language of political satire is opening gaps in the wall of fear built by the Palace.

By striking a stand-up artist's stage in Harbiye with the stick of “insulting the President,” the government has sent a message to the entire opposition: “We will punish even the slightest hint, irony, or smile in the harshest way.”

This arrest was made to break the self-confidence of the opposition and the street on the eve of the election, and to make the gray unhappiness that has settled over society permanent. Using the judiciary like a guillotine, the Palace is spreading the image that “We are still all-powerful, we can still put anyone we want in prison,” and is trying to regain psychological superiority through bullying.

However, what they forget is this: history records that no regime that bans laughter and attempts to imprison humor has ever been permanent. Whenever authority has gone after jokes and pranks, it has actually declared that its own end is approaching.

Deniz Göktaş being sent to Çorlu Karatepe Prison did not register the government's power, but on the contrary, its intellectual and social desperation, and its philosophical bankruptcy.

Let us end our article by saying that a state mind that cannot fight with the intelligence and words of a young person in front of it seeks the solution in handcuffs and iron bars.