Those in politics who don't look in the mirror...

Managing defeat in politics is much harder than managing victory. If you win, things run on their own for a while, and then, of course, you start to see the results of your actions...

If you have done the right things, the public will vote for you again. Just as the voters who gave the metropolitan municipalities to the Republican People's Party (CHP) in the 2019 elections gave them almost all of the municipalities in 2024...

But what if you don't know how to lose in politics, or if you become aggressive as you lose and end up making the citizens pay the price?

Then, look, you are doomed to a chain of losses.

Turkish political history has witnessed periods where two leaders in particular, Bülent Ecevit and Süleyman Demirel, alternated as prime minister. Süleyman Demirel's phrase, "I left 6 times with this fedora, and I came back 7 times," has entered the political lexicon.

It is not mentioned enough at this point, but Bülent Ecevit, as a social democratic leader, sat in the prime minister's chair exactly four times.

Moreover, his final term as prime minister was achieved by bringing the party he founded to power. Therefore, we can say of Ecevit that among social democratic leaders, he was a leader who came four times and left five, who knew how to lose as well as he knew how to win, and who could even rise from his own ashes...

The common feature of these two leaders was their ability to engage in self-criticism after the elections they lost and their ability to work with qualified staff.

The Ecevit Government consisted of legendary names such as Minister of Foreign Affairs Turan Güneş, Minister of Customs and Monopolies Mahmut Türkmenoğlu, Minister of Finance Deniz Baykal, Minister of Reconstruction and Resettlement Ali Topuz, Minister of Labor Önder Sav, Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Cahit Kayra, and Minister of Tourism and Promotion Orhan Birgit.

In the meantime, of course, the infrastructure for the process leading to the 1974 government was formed with Ahmet İsvan, who won the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, Vedat Dalokay, who won the Ankara Metropolitan Municipality, and İhsan Alyanak, who won the Izmir Metropolitan Municipality in the 1973 local elections.

Success in politics was also possible with qualified staff. And those years were periods when ministers—that is, the staff—were as valued and remembered as the prime ministers, the leaders.

In the history of Turkish politics, there has never been another period where the leader and the chairman garnered so much power, and the staff were pushed to the second or even third tier. Until the AKP government...

The AKP government, which began as a cadre movement at its founding, moved away from all its strong names and staff over the years and turned into a structure consisting only of the leader and the politicians clustered around him.

At the point we have reached, instead of learning lessons from the elections it lost and turning to qualified staff, this structure has chosen to make life difficult for CHP mayors who have won the affection of the public with their strong local management teams.

The government, which practically says with the policies it implements, "How dare you win the municipalities; let's see how you manage when we don't let you work," has fallen into the trap of obstructionism with the stick of collecting municipal debts it hadn't asked for in years, the threat of imprisonment if they don't collect the poor dogs on the streets, and the credits it forced them to take out or never provided at all.

Someone needs to tell them that there is nowhere to go by this path. When there is no one left in politics to hold a mirror up to leaders, they turn to authoritarian, cliquish, and anti-democratic paths due to the power poisoning they experience.

It would be good for leaders in politics to take the mirror that shows them themselves out from where they have hidden it... Just like the lines in the poem "Nilüfer" by Behçet Necatigil, beautifully interpreted by the esteemed artist Erkan Oğur: "I would take it out and look when no one was around; It was my mirror that would show me to myself, they have taken it."

That mirror that shows a person to themselves is sometimes their qualified staff, sometimes their closest friend, and sometimes themselves.

Please, do not lose...