Turkish Elections 2007

[Jay]

 

[Jay]

Party Leaders​

Ayşe Çiller Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi​	Ali Babacan Demokrasi ve Atılım Partisi​	Meral Akşener İYİ Parti​
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Refah Partisi​	İsmet Büyükataman Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi​	Ümit Özdağ Zafer Partisi​
Tuncer Bakırhan Halkların Demokratik Partisi​	Ahmet Davutoğlu Gelecek​	Rıdvan Turan Sosyal Demokrat Parti​

 

[Jay]

Presidential Candidates​

Muharrem İnce Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi​

Abdullah Gül Refah Partisi​

Selahattin Demirtaş Halkların Demokratik Partisi ​

Sabahattin Çakmakoğlu Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi ​

Kemal Okuyan Sosyal Demokrat Parti​

 

[Jay]

The wind in Ankara had changed. It wasn’t colder or stronger, just different. Posters flapped from lampposts with the red banners of Ayşe Çiller’s face smiling against her, Refah’s calligraphy-laced placards proclaiming “Adalet İçin Yeniden”—Justice Once More. Flyers slipped under doorways and car windshields like reminders of a funeral no one wanted to attend, but everyone had to. The election was all that anyone could talk about these days.

Deniz shouldered his bag and stepped out from the literature building of Ankara University, pausing at the gate where someone had scribbled on a Green Party poster: “Hayal Satıcıları”. A group of political science students were arguing nearby, voices like broken glass.

“I don’t trust any of them,” muttered one in a leather jacket, flicking ashes from his cigarette.
“CHP at least gave us the vote back,” replied a woman in a headscarf, clutching her books tightly.
“Gave it back?” the first one scoffed. “They took it in the first place.”

Deniz didn’t speak. He listened. That had always been his method, taking in the texture of the country through the spaces between words.

Across the street, a street vendor sold roasted chestnuts beside a volunteer in a DEVA jacket handing out leaflets. A short, older man yelled across the square: “They’re all the same! They’ll just change the color of our cages!”

Everywhere, the city was covered in ink and anticipation. Taxis had been draped in IYI banners, and the youth wing of the SDP had painted a mural over the crumbling university wall, a clenched fist breaking through barbed wire. It was already peeling.

What struck Deniz most, however, was not the volume of the election, but its permission to exist. For months, no one had truly believed it would happen.

People muttered in dormitories and cafés that the military would cancel the vote at the last moment. That General Kurt would find some “exceptional circumstance” requiring “intervention.” That ballots would go missing. That YSK would be a puppet. But then posters arrived. Then candidate lists were posted in every district. Then the date was set. And still the tanks remained behind their fences.

That night, Deniz took the metro back to Batıkent. At the station, a woman and her son were watching a public screen as the news blared headlines:

“Early voting has begun for Turkish citizens abroad, record turnout in Berlin and Amsterdam.”

Deniz got home, his mother asleep on the couch with a wool blanket over her feet. The television was still on, muted, with a news ticker crawling like an anxious insect. He poured himself a tea and sat.

On the screen, a reporter stood outside the YSK building behind her, protestors waved signs “Sivilleşmeye EVET!” (Yes to Civilian Rule). Another held up a placard shaped like a ballot box, cracked in two.

“With the campaign period now in full swing,” the reporter said, “polls suggest a tight race between the CHP and the Refah Party, with coalition dynamics set to determine the balance of power. Still, the true surprise has been the military’s continued silence.”

The screen flashed to images of Çiller shaking hands at a textile factory, Erdoğan touring a mosque in Konya, and a wide-eyed Green Party candidate planting a sapling somewhere near the Marmara coast.

Deniz leaned back and wondered if this was what history felt like when it wasn’t in the streets, but in the air. Subtle. Constant. Like wind. He didn’t know who he would vote for.
But for the first time in years, it felt like that question actually mattered.

---

Fatma Nur tucked a loose strand of hair back under her cream-colored headscarf and stepped into the university library. It was her favorite time of day, when the late sun filtered through the Ottoman windows and the marble courtyard outside began to quiet. In the past, she had often kept her scarf wrapped more tightly, conscious of how professors or classmates might glance, however briefly.

On the noticeboard by the law faculty entrance, election flyers competed for space. The university had tried to block the posters but the students persisted and kept posting them anyways. The CHP had softened its rhetoric, placing women, some veiled, most not, on its provincial tickets. Even DEVA, in a meticulously curated poster, featured a smiling hijabi entrepreneur giving a TED-style talk on innovation.

But Fatma Nur had seen this before. Symbolism didn’t impress her anymore. What she wanted was law. Real protection. A republic where women like her didn’t have to debate their humanity or prove their rationality to be taken seriously in court, in parliament, or in the street.

Earlier that day, she overheard her classmates murmuring in the cafeteria. “If CHP wins, we’re going to be drowning in this...” The first voice was thick with disgust. “It’s like a slow erasure of everything we fought for. You know, I hate it. ”

Fatma instinctively pulled her scarf a little tighter. She could feel the weight their judgment.

The second student, a girl with dark lipstick and a look of superiority, scoffed. “Honestly, I don’t get it. How can they think wearing that... thing... is freedom? It’s just oppression with extra steps.”

A tight, uncomfortable knot formed in her stomach. She forced herself to keep chewing, but her pulse was racing now. How long would they keep talking about her like this? Like she was a symbol of something they could just erase, like she wasn’t even human?

The first student, with a more frustrated tone, leaned in, lowering his voice. “It’s not even about the hijab anymore. It’s the whole idea behind it—what it represents. It’s like the past pulling us backwards, you know?”

She could almost feel his gaze on her, even without looking up. A part of her wanted to stand up, to turn and confront them, but she stayed frozen, caught between the weight of their words and the echo of a world that didn’t see her as a person.

Women like her. As if she were a demographic problem rather than a person.

Later that evening, Fatma Nur joined her mother in the kitchen as the news played in the background. The announcer was interviewing Ayşe Çiller, who promised to protect “the individual freedoms of every Turkish citizen, regardless of headscarf or haircut.” Her mother smiled gently. “Do you believe her?” she asked, stirring lentils.

Fatma Nur paused. “I want to.”

She had already registered to vote. It was her first time. She had spent hours poring over party platforms, comparing constitutional promises with actual candidate records. She had written in her journal that morning:

"I don’t want a revolution. I want normal. I want to walk into court someday as a lawyer and not have the robe feel like a disguise."

As the sun set over the Bosphorus, prayer call drifting faintly through the window, she opened her laptop to a debate stream.

---

The sesame oil hissed anyway, he kept it running out of pride, or perhaps out of fear that if he stopped, he might not start again. A battered Turkish flag hung limply from the cart’s handle. His hands, cracked, browned, permanent with oil, looked like they had been carved from bark.

It was near the roundabout in Fatih, where people came and went like tides. The mosque stood in the distance. Behind him, a political poster flapped against a rusted fence.

"BİR HALK YİNE DOĞUYOR."
— Social Democratic Party

The sight of it made his jaw clench. Just then, a group of SDP youth, no more than twenty, marched past in their bright red vests, laughing, handing out flyers with that same slogan. Clean-shaven boys and earnest girls with notebooks.

The vendor spat to the side. Then he shouted.

“Go ahead! March around with your slogans, your pamphlets! You ever tried selling chickpeas when your lira can’t buy a potato? Eh? You think you invented hunger?”

The students slowed, uncertain, as they glanced at one another.

He growled, his voice rising. “My brother was disappeared last year for protesting their rations! Don’t walk around like this country owes you anything!”

Others in the street turned their heads. But no one intervened. The youth, perhaps used to facing abuse from both left and right, merely offered a polite nod.
“Peace be upon you, uncle,” one of the girls said. “We hope the election brings better days.”

And just like that, they moved on, past the cart, past his memories.

The man fumed quietly for a moment. He took a cloth and wiped the edge of his cart furiously, even though it didn’t need it. His hands shook more than usual. He muttered curses, bitter prayers. A minute passed, then five.

Soon, two older men approached. One sold shoe polish. The other used to drive a dolmuş.

“Still alive?” one asked, slapping the vendor on the back.

“Barely,” he replied, pouring them each a small glass of steaming chai.

They sipped, standing beside the cart like generals around a war table, surveying a country neither of them could recognize anymore. They talked about inflation, about their children leaving for Germany, about rent.

“I got a nosebleed yesterday,” the dolmuşcu said, “and the hospital made me sign four forms just to tell me I wasn’t dying.”

The vendor didn’t laugh. His eyes wandered. The SDP poster still flapped in the breeze, taunting him. His knuckles tightened. He placed the tea glass down slowly and stepped toward the fence.

He would rip it. He would rip it until it begged for forgiveness. But just then, he heard a voice, small, hesitant, ashamed.

"Amca?"

He turned.

A girl, no older than ten, stood before him. Thin scarf, oversized sandals. Her eyes didn’t meet his.

“I’m not begging,” she said quickly, “but my sister hasn’t eaten since yesterday. Could I—do you have something? Just one sandwich?”

The air dropped out of him. The fire in his chest extinguished all at once.

He looked at her, then at the poster. Then back.

“Two sandwiches,” he said, clearing his throat, already wrapping them. “One for her, one for you. Understand?”

She nodded slightly before giving him a hug.

“And if she’s hungry tomorrow,” he said, voice barely steady, “you come here again. No shame in feeding your sister.”

She took the bundle with both hands like it was treasure, murmured thanks, and disappeared into the alley behind the metro.

He stared at the space where she’d stood for a long time.

The poster kept fluttering but he did not tear it down. His heart could only take so much in this country. Instead, he turned back to his cart, turned down the oil a bit, and whispered under his breath, not a curse this time, but a prayer.

“Yarabbi, bu sefer… bize huzur ver. Yeter. My God, this time… give us peace. It’s enough.”

---

At the metro station, the evening crowd swelled like a slow tide. Jackets were zipped. Faces were still. People moved slowly.

Deniz stood by the railing, headphones in his pocket, watching the trains come and go. He’d left campus later than usual, his bag hung heavy on his shoulder, but his mind was heavier. Posters for the CHP and Refah lined the turnstiles. Someone had scribbled “Freedom is not a slogan” in black ink over both.

Just down the platform, Fatma Nur clutched a book in one hand. She tried not to show how tense her shoulders were beneath her cream-colored coat.

Near the elevator, the falafel vendor stood beside his cart, which he pushed here in the evenings when the traffic calmed. None of them knew the others by name. They were threads in the same weary fabric. Passersby. Turks in a season of watching.

An older woman seated beside a shallow tray of beaded bracelets, knitted keychains, and Nazar amulets began to hum. Her voice, when it came, floated into the station like the scent of jasmine before a summer rain.

“Memleketim…”

The word landed like a pebble in water. A few stopped. Many didn’t.

But she kept singing, softly at first. The old patriotic ballad, "Memleketim," had survived coups, collapses, coalitions, and all the betrayals in between. Her voice was broken in parts, but full of memory.

“Bazen bir çiçek, bazen bir çocuk…
Bazen nazlı bir kuş, bazen bir sokak…”

A young man with earbuds took one out. A woman waiting for the escalator hummed quietly.

Then a cleaner joined in from the far end, his broom paused. Deniz closed his eyes as he took it in. Fatma Nur mouthed the words, barely audible as someone next to her began to hum the tune slowly. More voices joined. High, low, cracked, whole.

Young children looked on and some even tried joining on. They were singing for the old things that still lived beneath the noise, the ache of belonging, the weight of memory, and the stubborn belief that maybe, just maybe, this time, things could be different. They were all Turks in the end. Sons and daughters of this beautiful homeland.

Havasına, suyuna, taşına, toprağına
Bin can feda bir tek dostuma
Her köşesi cennetim, ezilir, yanar içim
Bi' başkadır benim memleketim
Anadolu bir yanda, yiğit yaşar koynunda
Âşıklar destan yazar dağlarda
Kuzusuna, kurduna, Yunus'una, Emrah'a
Bütün âlem kurban benim yurduma
Mecnun'a, Leyla'sına, erişilmez sırrına
Sen dost ararsan koş Mevlana'ya
"Yeniden doğdum" dersin, derya olur gidersin
Bi' başkadır benim memleketim
Gözü pek, yanık bağrı, türkü söyler çobanı
Zengin, fakir, hepsi de sevdalı
Ben gönlümü eğlerim, gerisi Allah kerim
Bi' başkadır benim memleketim