16th Turkish General Election, 2007

As I wrote before, there is no difference between the economic programs of the parties. Whoever comes to power, will follow Dervis-IMF plan. People know this. So they vote for other issues. Such as the Presidency crisis. Or the Kurdish issues (in the east and south east).

I don't personally know farmers, but I've been reading news of farmer protests. You know 'anani al da git' etc.

http://www.sol.org.tr/

This is the news site of TKP. They have a lot of critcism about AKP's agriculture politics. Search for 'tarim AKP' and read for yourself.

I won't carry that discussion over here, I don't know much about agriculture. But I know that everything is not perfect. Far from it.

Havign said that though, I am sometimes surprised with the pro-peasant attitude of some Turkish leftists. They are Marxists, but they are complaining about AKP politics destroying the peasant class and turning it into proleteriat...

Recently foreign investment figures were released. It turns out that although a lot of foreign investment enters the country, almost all of it leaves the country in form of profits. There is very little that is invested in production.

You say the economy is growing, but real wages in Turkey are still lower than 1998 levels. A lot money is being made in Turkey, by local and foreign capitalists rentier class, but not the people.

The people don't complain, because they remember the unstable governments and horrible economic crisis.

But the main failure of AKP's economic policies is despite the growth (which is mostly recovery anyway), it failed to reduce unemployment. Like Aydemir Guler said in his election speech, there are 5 million children workers in Turkey while we have 15% real unemployment (numbers vary according to sources). AKP, like all other governments, allows this situation, because it is more porfitable for the rich to explot the children while young people are unemployed.

I think if CHP was the government they would have done the same as AKP. Even the military sells their own bank to European capital, while barking about AKP being traitors. Now kemalofascists are saying 'AKP is selling the country to the foreigners'. But they also say 'AKP want to implement the sharia law'. These are scare tactics.

At best, they would have sold public enterprises to national capital rather than foreign capital, which is the same thing, ultimately. In any case, selling profitable public enterprises (built by taxes, and belonging to the people) to private capital is not the cause of economic growth under AKP.

As to 'arpaliks', AKP is no less corrupt than other governments.

In fact, I haven't. I told you AKP handled things well, and avoided confrontation with the military, and such major political crises. They haven't made big mistakes. And they worked hard in organising things at people's level, as you wrote. When Erdogan spoke in a rally, it was translated to sign language immediately for the hearing-impaired. This kind of attention to detail is way beyond the scope of other parties in Turkey.

So compared to their enemies, they are brilliant.

Old Ecevit, Sezer, Bahceli, Buyukanit, are just the beginning. Look at other enemies: Baykal, Agar, Kumcu... All dumber than one another. Agar and Kumcu said they will join together and form the DP, but they couldn't manage it. In fact they screwed it up so bad that AKP remained the only party in centre-right, which is the largest vote block in Turkey. Allah herkese boyle rakip nasip eylesin.

And Baykal will never leave CHP, and he will keep licking the boots of military. Will never increase his votes.

MHP can't do anything. They are a party of undertakers (cenaze levazimatcisi) and vultures (akbaba). When PKK kills some troops, they gain votes. But there is limit to that. So when AKP gets too strong, the military sends its people to attack Kurds (like in Semdinli) and PKK responds by killing some troops and MHP gains votes. This allowed them to enter the parliament, and reduce the number of AKP MPs, so it worked well. AKP should have exposed the Semdinli scam, but they were afraid of the military.