“They, who declare besuited Muslims unbelievers”

We have written many times that in case of failure to find hot money between 50 and 100 billion dollars to create a short-term relative balance in macroeconomic indicators, the chairman of the ruling party and the head of state will build their election campaign on 1) Religious rhetoric; 2)

Unimaginable mechanisms of pressure on the opposition. The first method has been in circulation for a long time, and just as the budget of the Directorate of Religious Affairs has been increased indefinitely each year, an academy was established because there were “not enough” religious schools, faculties, and universities. Last week's parade of clergymen showed that the mechanism worked perfectly. "When did the pressure on the opposition subside in order to have such an expectation during the election campaign?" I will ask, but I understand the futility of asking a question because the dose of this pressure exceeds the dose of the previous pressure at least 5 times.

I will never take further developments as a surprise - Turkish politics will be fed by this tension from head to toe in the next year. The source of tension is not only the parliament halls and rallies but also the political rulings of the courts.

The media, which unconditionally supports the government, has mastered the art of creating tensions. The Minister of Internal Affairs alone is one of the biggest sources of tension. Despite his humorous style, the Minister of Treasury and Finance is another source of tension. The Central Bank's interest rate decision and the inflation rate announced by the Turkish Statistical Institute on the 3rd of each month are other sources of tension...

Although the arrest and release of the chairman of the Istanbul branch of the Republican People's Party, Canan Kaftancıoğlu, from Silivri prison is another example of the government's interference in the execution of court decisions, there can be no doubt that it was a right step.

Turkey has survived the example of Tayyip Erdoğan, who went to prison in 1999 to serve a four-month sentence, for the second time at the last moment. It seems that the nature of the political profession on earth is as follows: politicians imprisoned for their worldviews inevitably gain sympathy in the eyes of the people (if I'm not mistaken, once the attitude of society to Ilgar Mammadov was the same in Azerbaijan). Apparently, they foresaw the consequences of Kaftancıoğlu’s stay in Silivri for several months, and on June 1, they refused to inflict the same fate on Istanbul Mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu (you can be sure that I wrote this with great regret - I never thought Turkish courts could be so politicized). While the society, which is already under the pressure of inflation and the nerves of which are damaged by stretching like a sleigh, is adorned with political tensions, the fact that the chairman of the ruling party and the head of state described the women who took part in the Gezi demonstrations nine years ago as "sluts" was to go toward the fire with gasoline.

This was not enough, and Mr. Erdoğan, the most experienced politician and statesman of Turkey now, once again made a mistake by asking the main opposition leader many ideological questions. For the first time since the war of liberation, Turkish society is not in a mood to be influenced by the literature "These lands are watered with the blood of martyrs" and to reflect this sensitivity in the ballot boxes.

No, I'm not talking about the complete loss of public sensitivity to these issues, the society expects from politicians, first of all, clear recipes for solving economic problems - I want to emphasize this.

Public opinion polls will determine the repercussions of the fact that the main opposition leader sends the ball to the ruling party's leader with 10 questions, mostly on economic interests, in the ratings in a few days. As the summer months of politics begin so hot, there is no choice but to wish that tensions do not rise further...

In an environment where macroeconomic indicators cannot be set right, the extent to which the Turkish government's stubbornness against Sweden and Finland's NATO membership will be enough to test the patience of the United States and NATO will be known at the NATO summit later this month at the latest. No one can object to Turkey's reaction to Sweden and Finland's patronage of terrorists and separatists under the political guise. However, if this reaction turns into an irreversible persistence, to what extent will Turkey-US-NATO relations be affected by this, and can Turkey be pushed into "valuable loneliness" a second time if relations worsen further? Reports indicate that Washington has no intention of making concessions.

Because if Sweden and Finland's membership is blocked by Turkey, the Baltic countries' membership in NATO will also be down, the series will not be completed, and the plan to imprison Russia in its own shell will fail. In return for which concessions will Ankara, which needs to think about all of this, pave the way for Sweden and Finland? Or will Turkey tense relations with the United States and NATO if it fails to obtain any concessions?

To see this, we need to wait for the third ten-day of June. While waiting, you remember the word of the head of state - "slut" - and the following verses of Alakbar Sabir:

“Sürtuklu müsəlmanları təkfirə qoyan bu

Döşdüklü müsəlmanları neylərdin ilahi?”

(They, who declare besuited Muslims unbelievers

God, what would you do with these aproned Muslims?)

When it comes to your mind, you can't stop making a comparison:

“Slut” (“sürtük” in Turkish) or “suit” (“sürtuk” in Azerbaijani)?

(Translator note – here there is only one letter difference between these Turkish and Azerbaijani words used by the author. So, “sürtük”, meaning “slut”, was used by the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and “sürtuklu”, meaning “besuited”, was used by the poet Mirze Alakbar Sabir.)

This is as important a question as membership in an international organization...