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There can be no doubt about who has benefited the most from the AKP’s economic regime: the 1%. The top percentile now owns 54% of the nation’s wealth, up from 39% upon the party’s ascension to power in 2002. With growth so dependent on speculative transactions in real estate and the financial sector, the share of the Turkish economy captured by wages has fallen in this period. Yet the AKP has been able to cut off just enough of an expanding pie—largely by taxing middle-income wages and further abrogating the labor rights of the more established proletariat—to keep many at the very bottom from complete ruination. Though their subordinate position within the neoliberal economy has not changed for the better, large sections of Turkey’s informal proletariat have been satisfied enough by the AKP’s modest redistribution to continue voting for the ruling party.
The AKP’s relentless campaign to portray any and all opponents of its political economy as atheist, coup-plotting foreign agents is not the only thing keeping many working-class votes in the ruling party column, though it is not a negligible factor either. Going into this election, the imbalance in media coverage of the four campaigns was astonishing, with some mainstream TV channels giving the AKP an effective monopoly on screen-time. Unwanted reportage, like Cumhuriyet editor Can Dündar’s disclosure of likely Turkish weapons shipments to Islamist rebels in Syria, have been hit with publication bans and those brave enough to resist now face threats of prison time: in Dündar’s case a life sentence! Meanwhile there has been a long string of attacks on HDP offices and activists, culminating in the June 5 bombing of a Diyarbakır rally, which claimed three lives. The intent, it seems, has been to reawaken the association of the Kurds with terrorism, by making them its target…
full: http://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/tk-election-june7/ _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
