Wouldn’t You Rather Be in Disneyland?
The other day, when I asked a Turkish colleague what she thought about the court case against the ruling party, she admitted, “It bores me. I don’t understand how, after all these years, we are facing this AGAIN. The same arguments, the same vocabulary we learned in grade school.”
Regarding the strangely blase attitude of much of the population about the Constitutional Court’s efforts to bring down the elected government, Andrew Finkel writes in his column:
I understand on an intellectual level that the decision pending in the courts to close the governing party down has grave consequences for the nation. But I just can’t take it seriously. It seems I am not unique. One parliamentary deputy I spoke with who faces a ban from politics reacted to the news of his indictment by taking his family off to Disneyland.
Alas, Disneyland is not large enough to accommodate the 47 percent of the electorate who supported his Justice and Development Party (AK Party)…. How will a well-organized grassroots movement react to an attempt to lock it down? If the courts go further and decide to shut down the Kurdish nationalist Democratic Society Party (DTP), this would effectively disenfranchise 85 percent of the electorate of the southeast of Turkey, where there is a history not just of civil disobedience but of armed insurrection….
Even if such grim intimations do not come to pass, even if the courts decide not to convict but to acquit, Turkey will be distracted by a political sideshow for months to come…. A government having to deal with a court case that affects its life or death is a bit like the man trying to assemble a bit of desperately complicated flat-packed furniture while concentrating on reading Nostradamus. The situation seems hopeless but not serious….
[The EU commissioner for enlargement, Olli Rehn, and] Commission President José Manuel Barroso will begin high-level talks in Ankara today. They probably wish they’d gone to Disneyland instead. (for full column click here)
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