The three beliefs of the Turkish opposition

A note on wishful thinking

You may be aware, dear reader, that I don’t post much on the hellsite called “X” these days, and even when I do, it’s generally very tame stuff. Gone are the 2010s, when we kept up with our TweetDecks and chased likes and retweets, and for the most part, I think that’s a good thing. (click here to follow me on Bluesky, and here for Substack Notes)

Every once in a while though, I do still tweet, and sometimes a tweet of mine will still hit a nerve. That is what happened a couple of days ago, and I thought I’d extrapolate on my point tweet with you, my favorite people in the whole wide web.

So, here is my tweet:

I quoted Hasan Öztürkmen, a CHP MP, who’re speculating about an impending AKP-MHP split.

Yes, it’s a snipe at Turkey’s main opposition.

Here’s what I mean by this: if you were to turn on a main opposition channel at any point for the last 5-10 years, you’d be very likely to hear one of these claims within 15-20 minutes. If you watched for an hour or two, you’d hear two or all three of them.

I think the average opposition voter is more reasonable, but opposition elites are very eager to make these three claims. I also think that the people who think along these lines are older than average, and have assumptions about politics that predate the AK Party era.

What’s remarkable of course, is that the thing they predict doesn’t happen, but they’ll keep predicting it. It’s the same reason Trump keeps predicting that Joe Biden will “come back” or how he thinks that the US will descend into a “1929-style depression.”

Below I’ve gone into a bit more detail on the three claims.