HURRIYET- Columnist Oktay Eksi comments on his interviews with Felicity Party (SP) leader Recai Kutan and True Path Party (DYP) leader Tansu Ciller. A summary of his column is as follows:
Whatever they do, we can’t get angry with certain people because even when we try to, we find a tender face which soothes our rage. This, at any rate, is the impression left on us by Felicity Party (SP) leader Recai Kutan. Probably if we talked about 100 subjects, we would agree on only 10 of them, but we would still be glad to get together with him again. When I met with Mr. Kutan on Sept. 26 in Ankara, such were the thoughts running through my head. However, we found that Kutan departed that day from his usual line. Probably he was under the pressure of the upcoming elections. When we asked him his opinion of Justice and Development Party (AKP) leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other AKP brass -- for example, Abdullah Gul and Bulent Arinc -- he spoke very frankly. He put across that Erdogan and Gul were intellectually inferior and Arinc, unreliable. The SP decided to support the proposal to postpone November’s elections and then voted this way in Parliament, which shows that Kutan and his colleagues aren’t hopeful about the elections. In other words, the Nov. 3 elections seem sure to disappoint Erbakan and his staff. We will see if the AKP, which is expected to replace them, is better than them, or if it’s dangerous in terms of being much more radical in our democratic, secular regime. In truth, we aren’t optimistic about the issue. The most striking aspect of our interview with Mr. Kutan was precisely this. Obviously the SP’s stated economic and financial policies can be considered important. However, the importance of a policy is directly proportional to the possibility of it actually being implemented. But on this prospect, the foreseeable future seems dim. We made the last of our series of interviews with True Path Party (DYP) leader Tansu Ciller earlier this week, as you can read elsewhere in the paper. If our journalistic responsibility hadn’t forbidden it, we would have left her house without ever seeing her because although we showed up right on time, she made us wait for her for a full quarter-hour, and then never bothered to explain her lateness. We used to think that Ciller had gone into the DYP despite being very close to the CHP’s ideology, although she never became a ‘social democrat.’ To the contrary, she always seemed closer to a ‘liberal’ leaning. However, during the interview we came to see that she actually is continuing the mission of the old Democrat and Justice parties because she says, ‘We will make a trillionaire on every street,’ just like Adnan Menderes said in the 1950s, ‘We will make a millionaire on every street’.
SOURCE: OFFICE OF THE PRIME MINISTER, DIRECTORATE GENERAL OF PRESS AND INFORMATION