Vegetable politics

"Pooh, this is only the local elections after all," said the lemon sourly. "I was the darling of national elections, not locals. Those were the days Ğ right after the merger of the centre-left under Erdal İnönü as the leader Ğ a more gallant man there never was."

For those who are unable to remember that far back, the lemon had its five minutes of glory during 1987 when the invigorated Social Democrat Populist Party (the ridiculously-compound name symbolized the merger of the two parties of the left, who did not want to abandon their names at all, let alone anything else) used the lemon as their campaign symbol. "Are you ready to be squeezed like a lemon for another five years?" asked the ad, under the picture of a squeezed lemon. This was a dig at then-Prime Minister Turgut Özal, whose liberal policies were accused of destroying the Turkish middle class and make the poor poorer while the rich got richer. Despite the campaign, Mr Özal got the mandate for another term.

The "lemon" campaign and the slogan got mixed reviews: many thought that comparing the nation to a lemon was beyond the dignity of the party’s academic-minded leader Mr Erdal İnönü. The PR agency which invented the slogan, however, thrived both in and outside Turkey.

Remembering all that, the onion did not at all defer to the lemon. "You are yellow-faced and sour ," he said. "Just like the left wing politicians of Turkey." But the lemon hardly heard the young onion. He was too busy remembering his glorious past. "In French, se presser le citron means to think, to rack one’s brains," he said proudly to the onion, trying to remember his high-school French. "Pooh, that will get you nowhere," said the onion. "The Spanish cebolla means head or the onion, so thereÉ who is brainier?"

The onion, for its part, swept to the political scene when Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan recited (again) poetry at Elbistan, where the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) has the grip of local power for the last five years.

In a desperate move to woo the voters with poetry, Mr Erdoğan recited a quartet from the town’s local son, poet Mahsuni Şerif.

"A whole lot is fed on the nation, how can the heart stand to see this?/The brave are hard up for an onion/I do not know what to say on this?" And if you think my translation is clumsy, gentle reader, just see the original! Thus, the onion, now officially the food of the brave, put its mark to the campaign.

"Onion Literature" wrote Hürriyet in its headline news, after an opposition deputy placed a question motion to the premier: "The fact that the people are not able to find an onion to eat, is it not the result of your economic policies?"

"Erdoğan gives dry onion to the people and villas to his followers," commented Oktay Vural of MHP.

"I am everywhere nowadays, from the newspaper headlines to question motions," boasted the onion. It was clear that all this attention had gone to his cebolla. When you say Deniz Baykal, however, it is the tomato that comes to the mind. The opposition leader had been drawn in the past with a head of tomatoÑa reference to his red cheeks and the fact that he came from the tomato-rich lands of Antalya. The cucumber, which had been silent all along the debate of the vegetables, finally broke in: "Listen, you had your periods of glory, but as far as Turkish politics go, it is me, the cucumber, who reigns for good."

For those who are not familiar with the subtleties of the Turkish language, a "cucumber" means a gross, badly-behaved and slightly foolish person!