Page 24 - bne_newspaper_January_25_2019

Opinion
January 25, 2019 www.intellinews.com I Page 24
Dramatic rises in the number of registered voters have been, meanwhile, observed in many districts. The highest rise of an incredible 95% was detected in Orta, a town in the Central Anatolian province of Cankiri.
Former interior minister Meral Aksener’s Iyi (Good) Party has objected to around 126,000 voter records, according to Burcu Akcaru, a board member of the party.
Pointing to the sheer scale of the figures, the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP) has proposed forming a parliamentary commission
to investigate anomalies including the instance
of 1,108 people registered to a single apartment in the southeastern city of Hakkari. The party has also applied to re-register tens of thousands of voters whose records were deleted, MP Meral Danis Bestas said.
“We are the biggest victims here”
The AKP, as you might expect, has a rather different take on matters. “The opposition
parties are trying to create the perception that
we are organising this [scenario producing electoral irregularities],” Recep Ozel, the AKP representative on the High Electoral Board (YSK) and the party deputy head responsible for election affairs, told Reuters on January 18, adding: “We are the biggest victims here”.
Ozel did not elaborate on why, rather than complaining to the media, the AKP has not directly brought its complaint to Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu, Erdogan’s hitman in the domestic war against terrorism and the head of the ministry which prepares the voter lists.
Erdogan is another who claims he is a real victim of electoral malfeasance. The president, who
has ruled the country since 2002 and before that held sway over Istanbul from 1994, is a victim of everything. Emotional manipulation—as perpetual victims he and his followers are always being cheated by someone or something—has never been less than at the heart of his populist rhetoric
but the main driver behind his longlasting success in keeping his voter base consolidated is a well- performing pyramid-shaped fund distribution mechanism, pre-election treats and all.
A total of 1.5mn voters in the country of 81mn have apparently changed their district since the snap polls last June and, Erdogan claimed last week, around half a million AKP members could not find their names on voter lists. He also did not explain why he had not pursued the issue with his interior minister rather than complaining to the crowds.
Where might those half a million AKP members have been distributed to, one ponders. It would be a tragedy for parliament’s dominant party if they should turn up in municipalities where safe majorities make them entirely superfluous!
Soylu’s categories
“It is the Interior Ministry’s responsibility to make sure every citizen can vote freely. As part of this, we see election safety falling into three categories: election rallies, voting, and ballot counting,” Soylu offered on January 20.
You can in fact make a parlour game of applying Soylu’s categorisation to the AKP campaign season realities now always seen in Turkey— polarisation, the sudden need to step up
military operations against Kurdish “terrorist” organisations, amendments to election law,
shifts in voter registrations, generosity in the pre-election economy, and so on. On voting day, there are always widespread incidents of CHP representatives being physically kicked and intimidated. And during the ballot counting, state- run news agency Anadolu always releases the final results before the tallies are completed—and the CHP leadership approves the results whatever their voters’ reactions.
But all of this is just a rather limited snapshot of some of what goes on: for more details on the AKP’s election practices, the OSCE reports are available for all past elections.