Etiket campaigning

“You got to power, but you failed to be a proper man,” snapped Deniz Baykal, the leader of the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) criticizing the language used by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan during his election campaigning. “This maganda style does not suit a prime minister,” he added. The definition of the slang word, maganda, is given in Turkish dictionaries as “an ill-mannered, vulgar and uncouth man.” Erdogan retorted by opening a libel case against Baykal demanding 50,000 TL ($28,000) in damages. But the argument did not stop there. Baykal addressing his party group defended himself. “Let’s see the epithets the prime minister hurled at us so far. He used words like ‘scum,’ ‘politically immoral,’ ‘dishonest’ towards us? What is more appropriate than saying that this style does not fit a prime minister? Until now, the prime minister opened four libel cases against me. Every single one of them was rejected by the courts. We never went to court against him. If he wants to have respect he must learn how to show respect to others,” Baykal said. Local elections in Turkey scheduled for March 29, have already provided enough material to keep the courts busy, mostly coming from Erdogan’s lawyers. Baykal was not the only politician to become the object of litigation by Erdogan. In a flurry of libel cases, Devlet Bahceli, the leader of the rightwing Nationalist Action Party (MHP) and a number of journalists also took their share of court cases for “insulting” the prime minister. One petition by Erdogan’s lawyers alleged that Bahceli “violated the personality rights” of Erdogan in a written campaign statement by saying, “Prime Minister Erdogan has appeared before the Turkish nation with a low level and cheap strategy based on lies, slander, abuse and deception. By taking up the weapon of […]