Symptoms of ‘Power Reflux’ in Turkey (IV)

If the deeply polarized public sphere and civic space of Turkey depicted in the Civil Pages’ report is any indication, it can also boast success in keeping its popular support base away from engaging in any meaningful exchanges of opinion with the remaining 50 to 60 per cent of the population.

As I mentioned earlier the Turkish society has not yet arrived in that grim wasteland of totalitarianism, but that is neither because the Turkish government is not willing to go there, nor because the justice system functions as it is supposed to function in a healthy and functional democracy — namely as a check-valve preventing power refluxes. The evidence we have so far seen reveals quite the contrary. The Turkish government is pretty much willing to go all the way down on that road; and the justice system appears to be one of the instruments par excellence, which it uses to drag the Turkish society along on this dangerous journey.

How come, then, the Turkish Government has not yet reached its grim destination? Does this mean that the government, despite all of its efforts, is singularly ineffective in determining the public opinion about its policies?

The evidence presented in Civil Pages report, as well the public opinion polls consistently measuring the government’s popularity and approval ratings between 40 to 50 per cent, suggest a mixed answer to that question. So far, the government appears to have managed to keep its popular support base intact to a large extent. If the deeply polarized public sphere and civic space of Turkey depicted in the Civil Pages’ report is any indication, it can also boast success in keeping its popular support base away from engaging in any meaningful exchanges of opinion with the remaining 50 to 60 per cent of the population, whose only commonality appears to be that they are all government ‘non-supporters.’

Since such societal polarizations work both ways, the government can also claim success in keeping at least some of these ‘non-supporters’ from reaching out to what they dismiss as a ‘faceless mass of pro-government sell-outs.’ Whereas the group, these ‘non-supporters’ dismiss, in fact are their fellow citizens, who merely have been dazzled by the government’s concentrated efforts of vilifying its ‘non-supporters’ as “non-native and non-national threats” to almost every “native and national” value the ‘supporters’ hold dear.

This means that, even if the government has not yet achieved the ‘total’ control over public opinion it aspires to, it seems to have managed to isolate a critical mass of loyal supporters from the rest of the population. It also assured to severely damage the lines of public and civic communication between its supporters and what it presents as their “non-native and non-national enemies.” The ‘non-supporters,’ in fact, is a heterogenous group of fellow citizens reflecting the cultural, political, ideological, ethnic, denominational, gender, and sexual orientation diversity of the Turkish society in its entirety.

But the apparent success of the government in keeping its support base more or less intact and in turning that support base against its non-supporting “enemies” is only one part of the answer. We find the other part of the answer in what the Civil Pages describes “as the most striking finding from their research.” That is the fact that “irrespective of whether they are pro-government or pro-opposition, all respondents find the constrained state of civil society and the introversion of the political actors deeply disturbing and they all perceive the current political crises to be more distressing than those Turkey has experienced in the past” (p.5).

This common perception of a political crisis being even more distressing than the many coups and coup attempts that have taken place in the last six decades in Turkey suggest, that the old political adage, which is attributed to Abraham Lincoln, holds true in today’s Turkey as well:

Governments can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but no government can fool all of the people, all of the time. And the Turkish government, for all of its totalitarian aspirations, does not seem to be an exception to this general rule, after all.