This order must change before the constitution...

I do not know if history repeats itself, but can it really repeat to this extent? The seventies were one of the rare periods when the CHP saw the face of power... Bülent Ecevit, the Secretary General of the Republican People's Party (CHP), who had created a serious impact with the center-left movement beforehand, turned his speech on the 1968 budget into a book later titled "This Order Must Change" and put forward a political line that far exceeded a budget speech.

In the days when there are discussions about a new constitution, Ecevit does not say "this constitution must change," he says "this order must change." How powerful, how striking a statement, isn't it? No matter what you do, you cannot fix a broken order even with the most qualified constitution. The government of the period, the Justice Party, was on one hand concerned with making a new constitution, and on the other hand, it was positioning the CHP as a threat to the constitutional order through the rhetoric of "changing the order." What a bitter but familiar contradiction!

Although the people change throughout history, the ground of the discussion and the arguments used never change. Is the issue the order or the constitution? Democracy, peace, and freedom will not come until this order, where income inequality is at its peak, incompetence runs rampant, favoritism has become a routine, and the oppressor and the oppressed never change, is changed.

In 2004, a film called "The Butterfly Effect" was released. I remember being very impressed when I watched it. The film, which featured a young man with the ability to return to the past, changing what he experienced in the past through this ability, and encountering different dramatic results each time, had made quite a splash. Just when you thought he had found the root cause and changed it, you would observe that it led to other problems that would shock you. At the end of the film, the screenwriter found the way to end the great dramas in his life by truly changing the order from the roots... Sometimes politics is like this; the minor nuances you can go back and change in the past will reflect on today as other chaotic problems. And furthermore, in an environment where political murders are still committed today, and money laundering and drug trafficking are rampant, what kind of result can you get by changing the constitution?

We can only explain the despair of a 20-year-old courier student being stabbed 25 times by another youth with a criminal record, the reckless murder of a school principal by an asylum-seeking student, the murderer who brutally killed a driver who picked up a young man passing by saying "you must be cold" and then taking his last money saying "you shouldn't trust some people," and the despair of a child who was abused by 15 people when she was only 13, through social decay and moral collapse.

The issue is a matter of mentality. In societies where lawlessness prevails, in systems where different treatment is applied according to the individual, you can neither ensure justice nor a fair order. Add to this poverty, high inflation, despair, and destitution... You cannot even raise your voice against the injustice you experience; your throat tightens, and you are left alone with your despair...

The final word is again hidden in the pages of history... Former CHP Chairman Bülent Ecevit says the following in his book titled "This Order Must Change": "Those who force changes whose time has not yet come, and those who prevent changes whose time has come, create a crisis in society... The methods of those who fight for power to maintain an expired order and those who try to come to power to realize a necessary change in the order do not resemble each other. Those who want to maintain an expired order carry out their struggle for power with games, tactics, and pressures... Those games, tactics, and pressures may be compatible with the rules of the established order, but they do not fit the rules of the new order that is intended to be established."

Yes, these are very important words for those who know how to learn from history and experience... Ecevit continues this writing by saying, "the shell of the old order has cracked once." We understand that he was not wrong when the CHP came to power in the next election.

With the 2024 local elections, this shell has cracked once again. However, it should not be forgotten that the infrastructure of a fair and clean order requires radical changes... There is no place to reach with paint to be applied over the existing one or with makeup to be done. This order must change before the constitution.