March 24, 2001

    Following is our party's general evaluation of the latest situation in the country, taking as basis a public poll, demonstrating the «trust» of the people in the parliament, the political parties and the system in general:

The People are Becoming Alienated
from the Bourgeois Parties...

    The people of Turkey are losing their hopes of the government and the other bourgeois parties. The results of the IMF policies are causing a decrease in the support given to the parties defending the policies of the IMF. Let alone the statements of the labourers against the government uttered in cafes, buses and workplaces; even the latest public polls are showing that the extent of the people's reaction have reached «unbelievable» levels.
    According to the latest poll of ANAR, carried out on the 27^th and 28^th of February and which was also published by the mass media, the ratio of the support for the five parties in the parliament are as follows: FP (Virtue Party), 9,4%; MHP (Nationalist Movement Party), 8,9%; DYP (True Path Party), 7,2%; DSP (Democratical Left Party), 4,9; ANAP (Motherland Party), 4,1. This means that none of the parties in the parliament, making legislations of privatization for looting, taking decisions that are effecting the future of the country, are not able to pass the 10 percent election quota. None of these parties will be able to enter the parliament in a genuine election system through which the people are not forced to «either vote for this party or that». Moreover, the total support for the three ruling coalition parties is only on the level of 17,9 percent. That is to say, the country is presently being ruled by a government which has the support of the 17,9% of the population. Beyond all these; the ratio of the «indecisive» voters is 16,9% whereas the ratio of the voters who have said «we'll have none of them» is 32,8 %. The sum of these two groups makes up a total of 49,7%, i.e. three times greater than the ratio of the support for the ruling parties! This total proportion was 32% in last January according to a similar poll.
    The propagandists and advisors of the capital are drawing out the conclusion that the «Parliament and political parties have lost credit» from these results but at the same time are not neglecting to use the results of similar polls which demonstrate that institutions such as the Presidency, the Turkish Armed Forces, the Police, courts etc. have been gaining credit (According to the poll of ANAR: The President has «scored» a 7,9 out of a scale of ten, the Turkish Armed Forces, 7; Police, 5,6; Religious Affairs Ministry, 4,5; the business world, 3,8; the media, 2,9; the Parliament, 2,4; the Government, 1,9 and the political parties, 1,8) in order to strengthen these other institutions against the parliament.
    However, no matter what the relative esteem of the other institutions is, if the parliament of the system, legitimizing the system by presenting it to the vote of the people at least every 5 years has reached the stage of drawing such a reaction from the people (in the poll, TBMM - The Great National Assembly of Turkey- has shared the position of being the last three along with the government and the political parties with a score of 2,4), the discussion will then be about the legitimacy of the system. For, in a parliamentary system, every institution from the presidency to the legal courts can only hold a legitimacy under the conditions that the parliament is considered to have a more or less legitimacy by the people.
    Whether the relations between the institutions of the system are good or problematic; at the last analysis, the designating factor outside of these relations, is the developments among the working class, labourers and their organizations. And the results of the polls have shown that the people have shown their reactions to this system and the relations exposed by the crisis of the system, beginning with the most hawkish defenders of the system. As a matter of fact, DSP, defending the system most militantly has lost the greatest amount of support. ANAP has followed DSP in this loss and MHP, evading all that has been happenning in a silent way, has lost the least amount of votes.
    Another point of interest regarding the polls is, the great amout of support lost by the opposition parties. Normally, in an «ordinary» system, if the ruling parties are losing support, opposition tends to gain it. However, here it can be observed that all the parties defending the system have lost support, moreover they have all fallen under the level of quota which has been determined as a «protection barricade» for the system!
    The most realistic and important result to be derived from this poll is that the people are at the beginning of a process in which they will ask for some answers from the system and its parties and «request» them to pay for their actions. Recently, the challenge of a group of economist lecturers against the free market defenders by publishing a «national economics programme», and the Labour Platform defending this declaration and stating that it can be taken as a basis for the «Programme of Labour», the active position of trade unions and labour organizations on such levels as has never been seen previously in many places, the growing tendency of the workers and labourers towards organizing and taking action are all evidence of the stage the people have reached in terms of demanding an answer from the system.
    The future of the struggle «completely» depends on the role that the labour organizations, the vanguard sections of the labourers, the class party and the other parties on the side of the class will play.

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS BUREAU