While our fingers point at cohabitation and house sharing, and our minds are troubled by the imposition of a particular lifestyle, we tend to overlook a larger project of social restructuring.
A reply to Marco Duranti’s premise as published on openDemocracy, that “The Strasbourg court is anti-democratic, just as its founders intended.”
The Democracy Package will only have a short term effect on Turkish democracy and will be incapable of tackling the main problems in our society.
About ten days after the democratic package was introduced, Turkey was tested, this time by a woman with décolletage. Turkey failed that test too.
The Violence Law can be seen as a site-specific implementation of intensifying methods to oversee the entire population: wholesale detentions and ex post facto indictments have emerged as the preferred method of intimidating, marginalising and criminalising dissenting groups en masse.
Turkey is on a journey beyond AKP patriarchy, “Aleviphobia”, and those social classes opposed to the AKP who have their own totalitarian tendencies, who call for a restoration of the first republic. We have to show that a “third way” centered on libertarian and democratic politics, is possible.
The package contains important but limited improvements. What it leaves out, however, may be its most significant feature, alongside the presentation.
AKP’s foreign policy is becoming increasingly problematic in a region that is fragmented along secular-Islamist divisions as well as sectarian and religious differences. We may be looking at a government playing with a majoritarian matchbox in a room full of gunpowder.
Turkey’s political landscape may be shifting in the wake of the Gezi protests, but the Kurdish peace process is flagging and distrust lingers between Turkish and Kurdish camps
Now, there are only the streets. And the streets are violent.
