Tears!

Let's be frank. After the disappointment experienced last year, no one had much hope for the local elections.

It was thought that Tayyip would take to the campaign trail anyway, apply his usual tactics of polarization, hostility, and alienation, scratch the nationalist and Islamist nerves of our people, turn the opposition against each other, use the state power at his disposal to the fullest, and get what he wanted.

He did all of these, and even more.

He tore everything apart again. He went so far as to say that the CHP was sending money to Kandil!

In the May 14-28 elections, he had paraded his so-called "aircraft carrier" from port to port and campaigned through rhetoric about the homeland, the nation, and Sakarya.

In this election, he flew his "national and domestic" fighter jet, deployed his 17 ministers to the field, carried space tourist astronaut Alper Gezeravcı around like a handbag from one rally to another, and asked for votes from our people.

His only concern was to finance his politics, feed the sects, religious communities, and the nouveau riche aggressive Islamist minority, and take Istanbul to create new rent-seeking areas through treasonous projects like Kanal Istanbul and to be able to sell off the country's land and soil to foreigners.

But it didn't happen.

His plans did not work out as expected.

Tayyip suffered a major defeat in the local elections.

He is aware of it himself.

The tone of his balcony speech, the sentences he used, and his acceptance of defeat show this.

His confidence has collapsed!

Not just three or five articles, but a dozen doctoral theses could be written about the political, economic, social, and even psycho-social reasons for this.

It may take a little longer for him to be erased from politics and for the political Islamist medieval mentality to be buried in the dusty pages of history along with him, but March 31 seems to be a turning point for Turkey.

If the CHP does not rest on its laurels after this significant success, and if it embraces its founding principles, the philosophy of the republic, secularism, and the social state more firmly, and works harder...

Let us emphasize this strongly!

Alongside the CHP, another winner of this election was Fatih Erbakan.

He caught those who said he would go and declare his support for Tayyip on the last day anyway off guard. He increased his vote share significantly.

The New Welfare Party (Yeniden Refah Partisi) became the third party after the CHP and the AKP with 6.19 percent. His surname and young age will make Fatih Erbakan a political figure that must be taken into account in the coming period!

Contrary to the words of government-fed trolls and Palace-sycophant propagandists who deem themselves worthy of the title of journalist, saying "This is just a local election... It should be evaluated as such," everyone knows that Tayyip put himself on the line in this process.

It was not Murat Kurum in Istanbul, nor Turgut Altınok in Ankara, nor the other AKP candidates.

Throughout the election process, Tayyip was always at the forefront!

All of the CHP's candidates competed against Tayyip and his one-man regime.

But the loser of this election is not just Tayyip.

Meral Akşener, who played a leading role in the loss of the May 14-28 elections, saw her party's votes cut in half.

Her own voters did not forgive her for saying whatever came to her mouth yesterday about those she was embracing three days ago.

She should realize that it is time to leave her seat and look after her grandchildren at home.

The results of this election have made it better understood how Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu has blocked Turkey's path for 13 years, how he has served the AKP knowingly or unknowingly, how he has kept Tayyip in power, and how he has imprisoned the CHP in the 25 percent band.

The Saadet, Gelecek, and Deva balloons, which Kılıçdaroğlu brought into Parliament with parliamentary seats he distributed generously just so they would support his own candidacy, burst on March 31.

Even though Özgür Özel has stumbled politically, and even though he has occasionally drifted towards Kurdish nationalists and second-Republicans, this success has been credited to him.

He broke the 25 percent band that Kılıçdaroğlu could not overcome. Let us underline with a thick pen that this is a very important psychological threshold for the CHP base.

With 37.47 percent of the vote, the CHP emerged from the ballot box as the first party for the first time since the 1977 elections. It moved two points ahead of the AKP.

Now this advantage needs to be utilized very well.

On the other hand, the view that "we cannot achieve success in elections without alliances, we cannot take Istanbul and Ankara" has turned out to be nonsense.

Ekrem İmamoğlu and Mansur Yavaş achieved historic success without being beholden to anyone, without trying to curry favor with the DEM or the IYI Party.

This should not be missed.

It turns out the issue was entirely about appearing before the public with self-confidence, with the right candidate, and with the right rhetoric and projects!

However, we must open a short parenthesis here and say that Mansur Yavaş's statement in his speech after the election that he was taking off his CHP badge again, just as he did in 2019, offended the traditional CHP base, republicans, and Atatürkists.

While there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of ways to emphasize that he will not make a distinction between those who voted for him and those who did not, expressing this through the CHP badge is extremely disturbing.

Mansur Yavaş should not forget that he sits in that seat thanks to the support given to him by the traditional base of the CHP, and while he should be wearing the badge of the country's founding party, Atatürk's party, with pride, making these remarks was not elegant at all, let us close the parenthesis and continue.

Another loser of March 31 is the DEM supporters...

The DEM received 2.11 percent of the vote in Istanbul. Instead of accepting that this result was a defeat for her and her party, co-mayoral candidate Meral Danış Beştaş came out and said, "Imamoğlu should not dare say these votes are mine, the votes he received are not his. Our voters voted there, why? Because they wanted to punish the AKP."

This statement falls apart no matter how you look at it. Ms. Meral accepts every Kurd living in Istanbul as their potential voter. She does not want to accept that Kurds can have their own minds, ideas, and expectations from local politics, and that they can determine their political behavior according to their rational interests.

She does not want to think that Kurdish nationalism and Kurdish racism have gone bankrupt in local politics; she does not take into account the possibility that the Kurdish voter has changed their political preference at all.

The fact that the DEM hit rock bottom in major cities in the west, especially in Istanbul, also rendered the Kurdish opening bargain that Leyla Zana and Ahmet Türk made with Tayyip before the election void.

The Kurdish voter in the west clearly sent the message, "You cannot put a mortgage on my will."

If Ms. Meral had not been a candidate, these words of hers might have had some meaning. But since political rationality is no longer of any account in Turkey, she can talk nonsense comfortably, thinking there will be buyers anyway.

Is it possible to explain this political picture that emerged on March 31 only by the fact that the masses hit by the economic crisis, especially retirees, showed a red card to the AKP, by the reaction to the refugees who quietly occupied the country, and by the growing hatred against the nouveau riche aggressive Islamist minority? Could this result force a general election before 2028?

Let us leave the answers to these questions for the next article, and let us put a period to our writing by saying let us continue to shed tears of joy now.