Will the 'ballot-box monarchy' collapse? What will replace it?

Should we exaggerate? Our fingers are tired from writing, our tongues are tired from speaking: We are in the era of "Abdulhamid III." We have begun to hear the cracking sounds.  

In Turkey, all the gains of the republican regime have been liquidated step by step, and most importantly, through a political violence that has taken into its service the hostility toward the republic of circles that could label themselves as leftist—perhaps they were right.

Let us accept this now.

We have been struggling in a monarchy for quite some time.

However, it is another fact that those who govern have been unable to bury the corpse of the republic they killed. This is the observation of writer Orhan Gökdemir.

The event entered its final phase not later, but much earlier, on September 12, 1980.

We have arrived at today.

For 10 years now, a regime of tyranny that grows heavier with each passing day has been in effect. We can call this a "ballot-box monarchy." Or the "Abdulhamid III regime"...

There is a ballot box, the people go and vote. But the votes they cast have no validity. If those election results conflict with those in power, they are liquidated in one way or another...

This "ballot-box" oppressive regime, the Islamist government, has two concerns. One is that the enlightenment-based founding character of the Republic of Turkey has become the property of the people. The popular classes do not want to lose the progressive stamp entirely or wave the white flag. They even seem to have created a "popular Kemalism" of their own. The second is women. The Islamist government cannot seem to overcome the silent reaction of women.

Therefore, we are experiencing an unending oppression, a kind of "permanent counter-revolution." But this is an oppressive regime that cannot quite reach its goals.

Let us remember this difference: What characterizes this ballot-box monarchy, that is, AKP reactionism, is not oppression with epaulets, but a completely instrumentalized "legal oppression." The shell of the law remains, its content has been completely emptied, and a reactionary regime and the system of exploitation it has established are kept alive through that image/institution. Terrible lawlessness is being perpetrated.  

Anyway, everyone already knows this.

I suppose the question that never quite gets a full answer is this: If this is the case, how is it that the externally dependent "benevolent monarchy" called Turkey—wherever that benevolence may be—can be the recipient of compliments from European democracies? Compliments do not necessarily come from praise; they can also come from not putting obstacles in one's path.

BALLOT-BOX COUPS: SEPTEMBER 12 AND ITS LEGITIMATE CHILD NOVEMBER 3

Well, is there anything surprising about this? In the end, the West did not behave differently in the two ballot-box coups, September 12, 1980, and November 3, 2002. It supported them.

Why, for example, does the European Union not speak out against the anti-democratic practices that have become rampant in Turkey, the imprisonment of tens of thousands of innocent people for years, or the "investigation and/or prosecution" of hundreds of thousands of people just because they criticized? What is the experience of a Selahattin Demirtaş and an Osman Kavala, who actually have little to do with leftism? What about Ekrem İmamoğlu and thousands of local Kurdish politicians? Has anyone witnessed the democratic "thing" we call the West ever making an issue of the monarchical oppression experienced in Turkey, a country of nearly 90 million people that is tied to it at the navel? Why don't they make an issue of it, I wonder?

We must find an answer to this.

Could one answer be this?

Turkey's external debt alone is 539 billion dollars as of the middle of this year. The creditors surely do not want to endanger a resource they are exploiting to the bone, nor their partners at the head of that resource, the gang of corruption.

When historians want to give a summary definition of the AKP regime one day, they might say this: They marketed all the country's values to the West, sold them for next to nothing, leased them, and thus created conditions where foreign capital could invest one and reap nearly a thousand; this is how they prevented this goose that lays golden eggs and its shepherds from being endangered... This is how they guaranteed themselves and their power. They made a calculation like, "If we collapse, their capital will also sink, so they won't touch us."

Indeed, if the AKP regime were to collapse—and the journey is heading there—do we know which foreign capital circles would suffer what scale of loss?

This is the entire calculation of Islamist Ankara: To make foreign capital, and thus the capitals, dependent on its own power in this way and to guarantee itself somehow. Wouldn't the dismantling of the AKP mean the evaporation of the secular, democratic Western capital that exploits Turkey to the bone? Wouldn't a source of income be liquidated in such a situation?

Have our progressive, transcendent republican economists provided a detailed and programmatic breakdown of these external exploitative powers so far, and have we been able to properly announce this to our people?

BUT THEN, WHAT WILL REPLACE IT?

Our main question here is this: If the current monarchy collapses, if the Abdulhamid III regime is razed to the ground and an "interregnum" begins, is there any guarantee that Islamist, ethnicist, mafia statelets will not emerge from the pieces of a Turkey that is planned to be torn to shreds, after an intense social storm, or that smaller and perhaps more radical variations of the AKP will not seize the reins?

How many Kosovos might they be planning to extract from Turkey? Those plans exist in the drawers.

Therefore, let us warn those who expect support from the West and those who consider the West a model and a target.

Very, very difficult times await the republicans.

Especially, there is no guarantee that Europe will not repeat its provocative role in the Ukraine War on Anatolian soil once the collapse of the AKP becomes inevitable.

If there are those who think that democracy will come after an Islamist oppressive regime that shows signs of collapse, we would like to suggest that these naive people flip through their notebooks a bit more. Let them take another look at the Yugoslavia-Syria line, or even Afghanistan...

A shattered profile could follow the "ballot-box monarchy" or the "Abdulhamid III regime," in short, Islamist Ankara, if a socialist-oriented republican movement does not carry out a breakthrough that can keep this political geography together...

It is certain that EU democracy will try to stifle this second intervention, that is, the republican initiative.

What should be done?

It seems we will return to this matter again...