SShe had put on a bright yellow dress and walked like the sun and full of hope for the Kreuzberg election party. My little daughter had wished her mother “good luck” at the front door, after which I sat alone in front of the television. At some point the daughter came out of the children’s room, stood directly in front of the television picture as if she had to check something, then she said: “I don’t think he’s bad at all.”
“That’s Bovenschulte, not Erdogan,” I explained to her, “that’s a kind of president of Bremen.” My daughter heard her mother’s concerns about her country and the excitement that Sunday, so she decided to vote in the state elections in Bremen the Turkish fate election held.
Her Turkish grandmother once read a bedtime story by narrator Aziz Nesin about birds electing a president, the story came to me on election night. The birds elected the President by shitting on him three times. Not the thinking people voted, but shitting birds. And since the president always wanted to be re-elected, he no longer did anything for the thinking people, only for the birds, which grew bigger and bigger under his presidency. But how does the story end?
The hope of women
For weeks we helped raise the hopes of the Turkish night of the parliamentary and presidential elections in the small Rinke family, above all: the hopes of the women who have been exposed to more and more violence and injustice since Turkey left the Istanbul Convention of the Council of Europe .
The hope of the imprisoned or escaped artists, writers and journalists whose lives were to be decided on this election night: still in prison, in exile or finally in freedom, in Turkey, at home.
The hope of the opposition politicians and human rights activists, who have also been locked away, who have no chance of legal processes in a Turkey that is no longer far ahead of North Korea on the list of press freedoms.
The hopes of the university teachers and civil servants who were suspended by the tens of thousands and whose passports were confiscated.
The hopes of secular, western-oriented people, city dwellers and academics who will emigrate in even larger droves if the president and his ultra-nationalist, Islamist, Hizbullah-affiliated and misogynist electoral alliances win another election.
The hope of a large part of the population of Kurdish origin, which is more left-wing and democratically oriented and is therefore politically persecuted, arbitrarily placed in the vicinity of terror and subjected to torture and prison.
The hope of the traumatized earthquake survivors, abandoned by the government and centralism, who see how little aid is arriving and who have understood the complicity of the construction industry, which has been corrupted by the ruling AKP party.
The hope of the people who can no longer make ends meet in Turkey with inflation that is only higher in Argentina.
The hope of the people who have taken part in the decades-long deal and accepted that the AKP rulers will stuff their pockets, undermine the rule of law and all the rest will get a bit of prosperity, shopping malls and warships in return.
And also the hope of people who dream of a more conciliatory society, of less division, less agitation, less hatred.
Just the way my wife unlocked the front door that night when she came home was a sign. She didn’t come through the door with verve and energy as usual, but the footsteps sounded slow, restrained, tired.
