Wednesday, July 18, 2007

The insignificant citizens of Turkey

Who are they? Of course us, the ones that live in other countries. We are many, I guess, but we cannot vote in the coming elections unless we travel to Turkey between 25th of June and 22nd of July. Many countries let their citizens vote by post or at their embassies/consulates, but we, the Turkish citizens, are not given this right. Why??

2 comments:

super hero said...

what? of course you can vote, and if i am not mistaken, you have a larger time span than we have. you have the freedom to go and vote within a week or so, while we other turks who happen to live in turkey can only vote in one single day, and only if we are not far from home.

Yasemin said...

As I have already written in my post, we can vote 'only' if we travel to Turkey within certain time limits. If we didn't already have a plan for travel this summer to Turkey and if this travel is not in the given time period we cannot vote. Not everybody can travel 'just like that' only to vote. Think about Turks living in Australia, USA, Brazil, other far away countries. We have our jobs here, families, children that have schools etc. You cannot just leave everything and take a plane ticket (who is paying??) and travel to vote. Do you remember the last elections in Italy?? The votes of Italians that live in foreign countries had an important impact on the results. This could also be the case for Turkey. Italians could vote by posting their votes to their embassies. It is as simple as that, for the cost of a postal stamp they could vote, not paying hundreds of euros to plane tickets and losing working-time.