2 sene sonra bu durumdan kurtulacam amk

from the outside, people may think turks are very conservative when its comes to sexual morality. the decision this week by two nationalist movement party (mhp) deputy chairmen to resign and withdraw from parliamentary elections after the release of a video of them in a compromising situation probably consolidates this opinion.

another example that supports this view is an earlier decision by the republican people’s party (chp) to replace its chairman after a sex video scandal. but the cause-effect relationship is not that simple. if the woman involved in that scandal had not been someone who had worked as chp leader deniz baykal’s secretary for many years, then baykal may not have resigned. in party autocracy, the party leader decides who becomes a deputy; as a result, sexual relationships can be problematic in terms of political ethics.

the issue at hand is nothing like a claim that italian prime minister berlusconi had sex with a minor.

the relationship that two important figures in the mhp had with professional prostitutes is also not the issue. the issue is what these two politicians said before engaging in intimate acts. one of them severely insulted right-wing voters who voted for the mhp. the other used hate speech about one of the most sensitive issues in turkey, the alevi issue. in the material leaked to the press, their comments initially drew more attention than the visual content.

the political ethics of these scandals at both the chp and mhp leave the sexual issue in the shade. two different faces of the politicians are captured in a single frame: one abuses his political power for his own sexual gain; the other shows that he is not who he appears to be. this is the real reason why the chp leader was forced to resign and why the mhp leader asked the two mhp deputies to resign from their positions. in both cases, sexual misconduct exposed an underlying mistake. and it gave us an opportunity to test political honesty and responsibility.

the history of turkish politics is fraught with sex scandals like in europe and the us. until now, these scandals have not caused significant political changes. the biggest shock was the chp’s decision to change its leadership because of a video scandal.

in view of innovations in technology we can make a prediction about the future. video and audio recording devices have advanced significantly and it has become increasingly easier to record images and sounds. extensive efforts are being made in politics and in the business world to obtain compromising footage. specially trained prostitutes are being used for these purposes. it was uncovered that a spy network within the turkish armed forces (tsk) also used high-tech resources to obtain compromising images of certain individuals. these images were later used to blackmail them. these developments show that there are people who succumb to blackmail and do as they are told.

playing dirty politics can be very productive because it is so easy to get results with this method. the conclusion is that dirty politics will continue to introduce new agenda items over coming weeks. let me repeat, the cause is not about turkey’s extremely conservative stance on morality; it is the ability of this method to expose other dimensions of politics.