" THINK WE ARE UNITED " In Our Globe, However........ . ?

On 10^th of August 2014 Turkey had its first publicly voted presidential elections. Just one year before Turkey was uprising against the neo-liberal and conservative policies of the government, known as the Gezi uprising. 2 months after the first year anniversary of the Gezi uprising, the Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who was shown responsible of corruption scandals, destruction of common spaces, death of more than 400 miners, extensive police violence , surveillance policies and many more atrocities got %51,74 of the votes and became the first publicly elected President. Nationalist opposition front candidate got % 38, 49 and Kurdish Party leaded leftist coalition candidate got %9, 77. Participation to the elections was one of the lowest in the Turkish history, %73, 75 voted. People were puzzled and felt frustrated. How come one of the biggest uprising in Turkish political history could not stop the prime minister to be the next President? The scapegoat was easy to find. Especially the nationalist opposition aggressively blamed it all to the ones who did not vote. The impact of Gezi uprising only mentioned within the votes of the leftist coalition candidate.

However can the drastic increase of non-voters in such an important election mean something else? Can it be the major impact of Gezi that indicates a deliberate position on representative politics . People who did not vote could not find a ground to explain themselves yet, however in this paper I aim to question if the high rate of non-voters can be counted as a reassurance that Gezi uprising was not solely an anti-governmental rally and people are actually demanding a new politics that would not set barriers in between them and means of politics.

In this paper I aim to analyze Gezi uprising with presidential election results through the critical thinkers’ debate on Gezi and on global uprising movements. Such an analysis seems a crucial and easier one to grasp an understanding about aims or directions of the Gezi uprising regarding the party politics and representation after the recent elections.

At this point lets recall how Gezi uprising flamed and what had happened exactly one year ago. The Turkish government found the way not to get affected by global economical crisis by turning Turkey to a big construction site. All over Turkey gentrification and renewal projects were carried out aggressively. It was also criticized as a program to get rid of certain unwanted groups. Worker districts, districts dominated by leftist organizations, ghettos of ethnic groups like Kurdish, Roman, Alevis, unwanted populations like sex workers etc were the main target of the governments' gentrification and renewal projects. Anti-gentrification movement was growing each day when another neighborhood was becoming a construction site to build residences, hotels or shopping malls.

A group called Taksim Solidarity, which consists of trade unions, parties, wide range of leftist, ecologists, feminist and LGBTI groups, was organized against the Taksim renewal plan. In the evening of 27th of May 2013, people who recognized bulldozers in the Park were Taksim Solidarity members returning from their weekly meeting. It was an immediate decision to stay on guard in the park that night to stop bulldozers cutting down trees. The next morning police attacked to the press release in the Gezi Park with teargas and water cannons. Until the police attack in the dawn of 31st to clear the Gezi Park from tents and protestors, people kept coming, staying and creating another way of being together. What was unexpected was the evening of May 31st. After the police raid in the dawn, solidarity protests started to take place in other cities and kept expanding under one slogan "Everywhere Taksim, Everywhere Resistance". Next evening, Gezi Park was occupied yet again, which resulted 15 days of communal living inside the Park and nationwide protests continued to take place every evening until the 16th of June.

What was unexpected was that non organized people, who were following what was going on in the Gezi Park, immediately found themselves in the streets protesting. For more than 3 weeks people lived a dual life; going work during day time and being a protestor at night. After police violence escalated to a dangerous level, with the call of Taksim Solidarity, street clashes transformed to neighborhood forums again with the motto of "Everywhere Taksim, Everywhere resistance" where ,even after one year, subjects still invent a new way of being. When it is asked, people express their experience of Gezi uprising in a common way, as if they all agreed to say the same thing; it was an unanticipated, unexpected event that united us. Nothing will be and can be as it used to be.

A critical Turkish journal called Express dedicated its June 2013 issue to Gezi uprising. In the editorial article it writes; it happened exactly as Badiou formulated, this is what Badiou calls an Event. And continues with a quote from Badiou; "an event is a rare and unpredictable immanent break from the prevailing language and established knowledge of the situation. That's why it cannot be foreseen, or easily recognized". However for Badiou, who came for a conference and visited certain neighborhood forums right after the Gezi park occupation Gezi uprising is an immediate riot with a potential of becoming a historical uprising. Badiou categorizes immediate riots as the ones triggered by state murders that are "violent, anarchic and ultimately without enduring truth". For him, an immediate riot is localized, limited as in territory and in population. Badiou comprehends Gezi uprising as the uprising of educated, middle class, secular youth and he expresses 2 main concerns. His first concern is about its scope. He is concerned that the Gezi uprising was not diverse enough to dispel the fictional identification that states create to implement their political agendas. His second concern is about the aim of the uprising. He asks, "Is the action being guided by the Idea of popular emancipation and equality?" and adds " This choice will determine whether the current uprising is just a modernization of Turkish capitalism and its integration into the world market, or whether it is truly oriented toward a creative politics of emancipation, giving new impetus to the universal history of Communism".

It could be argued that the first group who decided to stay on guard in Gezi Park shares a certain characteristic, not being middle-class, educated, secular youth but being politically active, being organized. However starting from 31st of May, the night it spread nationwide, apoliticals, leftists, anarchists, and right-wing patriots revolt and debated together. As Douzinas emphasises "It cannot but include right-wing and religious people, patriots and the apolitical...Without these 'others', the multitude would have ended a rather oversized rally reproducing the protest strategies tested and failed over forty years". In that sense, Gezi uprising did succeed in demolishing the power of the identitarian fiction. However, identities are not eroded but in a way unified under another identity given by the Prime Minister. As Douzinas points out "the relatively neutral term 'crowd' is accompanied by a number of negatively charged words which express fear and contempt towards a social category that acts outside accepted and tolerable norms". The PM gave the name 'looters' to Gezi protestors. Instead of rejecting and opposing to be named as 'looters', protesters embraced it. Giving a name to people that cannot be reduced to one single identity, resulted a feeling of belonging to a pluralistic identity of multitude. Identities, pluralities are not eroded but co-existed under the name "looters". Being a looter enabled a communication regardless of identitarian prejudice.

Zizek who also attended the same conference with Badiou and visited forums in Istanbul highlights that protests in Turkey should not be understood "merely as a secular civil society rising up against an authoritarian Islamist regime" but contains an anti-capitalist drive. However, he adds "the protesters aren't pursuing any identifiable 'real goal'. The protests are not 'really' against global capitalism, 'really’ against religious fundamentalism, 'really' for civil freedoms and democracy, or 'really about any one thing in particular"...but rather "there is a fluid feeling of unease and discontent that sustains and unites various specific demands". He articulates his disbelief to recent uprisings all around the world and stresses that left failed to transform them to a project of social change. Douzinas replies to Zizek's skepticism with celebrating Syriza's electoral success in Greece after the uprisings in Greece and suggests that political transformation in Greece can be a guide to other movements.

Arguing that recent uprisings, and Gezi uprising in particular, failed to result a social change, contains a danger of neglecting the importance and impact of engaging in collective political act and debate. In Gezi uprising, all those groups who had been separated from each other by the states' identitarian politics, started to meet and to practice another way of being, living, communicating with each other against the existing situation. Through social media people shared their encounters, some even similar to a confession. Such as how they now comprehend what Kurdish people have been going through, and how truths were manipulated by media. Football fans corrected their sexist and homophobic slogans after feminist and LGBTI groups' warnings. White collar workers, with their blazers, ties, dresses and high heels, were in Gezi Park every day after work interacted with trade unions, and regained their place inside workers' struggle. Leftist groups that divided within years had to face their own history. A group called anti-capitalist Muslims precluded blaming it all to Islam and dismantled the governments' religion based accusations on Gezi uprising and protestors. The leftist generation of 60's, 70's and 80's felt proud and supported their children who were always condemned as being highly individualistic, capitalist and apolitical. As Hardt and Negri emphasize, “participants experienced the power of creating new political affects through being together”

Such a multitude that cannot be identified other than looters, brings a great variety of ideologies as well. The ideology of Gezi uprising is referred as the Gezi Sprit. It is important to indicate that call outs and press releases of Taksim Solidarity have been constructing the fundamental pillars of the Gezi Sprit. In this sense, an organization that carries out the process might seem to be inevitable rather than a must. However, adopting a party and evaluating the success according to electoral results, reduces the potential of a new politics to the same old one. Whether to found a Gezi Party was one of the main topics during the uprising and aftermath at the neighborhood forums. While a small group of people supported the idea, others remained skeptical for several reasons. The main opposition party supported the Gezi uprising with hegemonic ambitions and tried to dominate the ideology by reducing it to an anti-government rally. Although the political discourse quickly transformed to simply being anti-government, it rejected the domination of the main opposition party. As Douzinas underlines "a new configuration of political time and space emerged which removed the monopoly of professional politicians". Rather than a failure or disability of the left, it can be argued that the looters neither wanted another group of professional politicians, nor to be leaded by the existing ones. In other words, they did not want to give back the act of politics and reduced to a vote.

Douzinas finds Badiou’s, Hardt’s and Negri’s rejection of the party politics and the left as unconvincing, and criticizes them by dismissing politics that do not fit to their theory. Nevertheless, the Gezi multitude’s rejection of establishing a party and being lead or represented by one also has to be considered as a political stand point. The candidate of the leftist coalition lead by the Kurdish Party got % 9, 77 of the votes. Political analysts considered only those votes as the impact of Gezi uprising. However, unlike other elections % 26, 25 did not want to be represented. Non-voters who are blamed for losing their fidelity to the truth, who are considered as the sole reason of the Prime minister's election as President, who are condemned and expelled by the opposition might be pointing something else. We might be missing the Gezi uprising's biggest impact on elections, that is the dramatic increase of the non-voters. That might actually be the strongest evidence against the concerns of whether Gezi uprising had an emancipatory aim, a desire for another politics. Hardt and Negri point out that the refusal of representation and representative government structures reveals that the crisis is also a constitutional one. They continue by suggesting making law common. At this point, as critical legal theory scholars we might have a task to start a debate on possibility of another law, a non-representation based constitution, and politics.

To conclude, August presidential elections resulted with the former prime ministers’ victory. Whose policies faced an overall rejection with one of the biggest uprisings in the Turkish political history. High rate of non-voters quickly blamed for his victory. They are considered as the betrayals of the Gezi Spirit, a dagger stabbed to the back.

But in this paper I aimed to provoke another reading of the non-voters. By pointing out the pluralistic multitude of the Gezi uprising, its undefinable ideology and its deliberate refusal of representation, I tried to argue that the non-voters should be considered as the main impact of Gezi. To consider the non-voters as looters acting within the Gezi Spirit, opens a whole new debate on representation, and constitution. Although it is not possible to foresee its direction, surely as people in Turkey says "nothing can be as it used to be".