The relationship between political parties and media-communication factories interpreting political reality towards citizens or the people, depending on which political sentiments you prefer, is characterized by a rather visible paradox. Attitudes and values that circulate among voters are treated as mostly unchanging and the business model of parties, especially those who want to win power from the opposition ranks, is based on reading the political market sold to them by various agencies and adapting programs and attitudes to that reading. Therefore, the voter is not treated as someone you can convince of your views, but as a consumer sovereign whose preferences you must adapt to. Of course, this does not mean that the parties of the so-called left-liberal center will approach extreme right-wing voters, but it can very easily happen that they turn to the right if they judge that the "political mood" has changed.
In addition to placing the voter and his preferences at the center of his or her market seduction, a communication process takes place in parallel that leaves the impression that voters are treated as politically deficient animals that can be induced by certain mechanisms as if their level of political literacy is at the level of training. So we can read and watch the comments of mostly communication experts, whose rise on the ladder of political authority is a clear indicator of the direction in which politics is going, but also of other media commentators from the most relevant houses, who predict voter reactions to certain events, attitudes or affairs, as if they these same voters do not look at all, as if they are only addressing the politicians in the parties. Of course, we can all assume that certain political events will influence voters' attitudes, but I guess those attitudes are partly influenced by the fact that voters watch and listen to these shows and read portals. If they are not explained what happened, but are told how they will react without having thought about the implications of the event themselves, then politics is reduced to a weather forecast: oh, it will rain tomorrow, so I will take an umbrella to work. And on treating voters like idiots.
This paradox, which characterizes our domestic political scene, but also a much wider one, suggests that some basic political questions are no longer being asked. One of the basic questions is: how is politics valorized? How, then, do people or citizens evaluate the value of certain policies? There are, of course, numerous surveys that find out what are the political priorities and what people are most interested in, but it seems that the question that under valorization refers to how people think about politics, how their attitudes are formed, is persistently missing. The paradox we mentioned is a symptom of this absence: voters are either consumer sovereigns to whom we must adapt or fools who are guided by mere reflexes and whom we must manipulate. This way of thinking about politics does not have to be particularly complex. It is also possible that someone decides to vote for the HDZ in the upcoming elections because his salary has been increased at his workplace in the public sector. With that move, did that person simply agree to mass political corruption or did he suggest that he has priorities that can be realized without corruption, but not just by pointing out corruption?
What about people who work in the private sector and whose level of quality of life is to a lesser extent or at least significantly more mediated by public policies? And are we even allowed to ask the question whether this "pure" economy, which partly determines the level of quality of life, is the same politics that has been depoliticized through political action? Or will we continue to rely on the theses of great domestic thinkers who tell us that the main difference in political thinking in our country is the effect of historical trajectories: the political mind depends on whether the regions were under Turkish or Austro-Hungarian rule.
Invoking "long-term structures" when explaining the political situation can be useful, but it is mainly brought into play in our country to explain that we are hostages of political fate or "stupid people". In order to avoid this, the question should be constantly repeated: how do people think politically? How far does politics go for them? Is the personal political to them and is the economic political to them? If so, why is it, if not, why not? Politics is nothing but social relations between us all. And if sometimes the horizons narrow, you should go back to the basics. Because the answer is never the same and always carries within itself the potential of desirable change.
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