Every day the caravan of MP and Candidate (PASOK) Ilhan Ahmet leaves Komotini for the Rhodope Mountains.

Several cars with his friends and associates, some of whom were Christian volunteers and led by him, pull up before sunset in Pomakochoria to talk to his fellow believers.

They are followed in a separate car by a women’s “shock” team led by his wife Belgin. She was also hired to carry her husband’s message from house to house to Muslim women, as the access of a (foreign) man to houses in the presence of women is not allowed by tradition. They have a place for dates, contacts and discussions until about ten in the evening. This is the time when men quit smoking and gather in cafes for tea and conversation, and women at home have not yet locked the doors.

All this goes on until darkness shrouds the pine-covered mountain slopes and isolated local communities forever, after which all activity, at least public activity, ceases. People stuck at home and with the “plate” (permanently) turned to the east, these days are anxiously watching the developments around the elections in the “Motherland” through Turkish channels. Interest in Erdogan’s fate is more alive among the minority than in who will be elected prime minister next Sunday in Greece, where they live.

At ten o’clock Akhmet’s “escort” is sent back, and the next day back again – before the voting day. Organi, Kekhros, Chloe, Kardamos, Esokhi are some of the forty-five Pomacochoria in the Rhodopes to which he conveys his message. He will go where he can because he has no other choice but to “run his little legs” through the slums and villages if he wants to get his message across to Muslim voters and wish him good luck in the elections. The “system”, as he calls the powerful mechanisms of the minority, controlled by the Turkish consulate in Komotini, has cut off all other channels of communication with his fellow believers.

Well-known lawyer and three-time member of parliament Ahmet has long been on the path of clashing with the Turkish consulate and minority structures, and the upcoming elections provide the “mother of all battles.” Reason for the break? He openly and publicly challenges the consulate’s underground tactics of manipulating the minority. “Vote for me for social emancipation and a sip of freedom” – with such a slogan he goes to the polls.

Ahmet seems to embody the liberal pro-European world of a minority who want, though not actively stating it, their lives and the lives of their children outside of suffocating social molds and political “bonds”. His re-election would not have attracted general interest if two worlds had not collided at the ballot box in the Rhodopes.

If Ahmed is re-elected, it will be his personal victory, which will also be perceived as public disapproval of the uncouth and oppressive methods of manipulation by the local consulate on the part of the Muslim society.

The PASOK candidate has publicly questioned the Turkish consulate’s underground tactics of manipulating the minority.

His eventual defeat would send a signal to the minority that “when a sheep leaves the pen (i.e. the plans of the consulate), it is eaten by the wolf.” According to colleagues and friends of Ahmed, the reason for the all-out ostracism operation was his public interrogation in an interview on local radio last fall about the consul’s right to interfere in the internal affairs of a minority.

Certainly, this was not the first time that the member in question had expressed his dissatisfaction with the intrusive role of the consulate in the daily life and activities of the community. However, with his statement, Ilkhan got out of the “pen”, and the “Rhodopi wolf” had to act.

With a clandestine “fatfa” issued by the consul, Ahmed was expelled from the informal Minority Advisory Committee, which includes its elected members (deputies, municipal governors, pseudo-muftis, etc.), because, as the corresponding announcement says, “he has lost all emotional attachment to a minority, and our identity, present and future, is no longer of value to him.” There was a flurry of publications in the Consulate-controlled press calling on Muslims to fire Ahmed, who, they claimed, “has now defected to the Christians.”

After that, official doors began to close one after another for the popular MP, who, however, has a high level of communication skills and has built strong trusting relationships with ordinary Muslims, especially with the modernizing and pro-European wing of the minority. Now the operation of political destruction is in full swing. If he is not elected, he will be politically “ended” and no one else will dare to “escape”. Otherwise, defeat will be hard on the consulate and the hardliners.

Ahmed is the only candidate in this election who is prohibited by the directive of the consulate from conducting pre-election dialogue and participating in minority religious and social gatherings. Since any activity in the Muslim community on the way to the elections takes place mainly on the Internet, media controlled by the consulates and mosques, Ahmed is in a difficult communicative position.

Channels to the Muslim electorate are cut off, and all that remains for him is speeches to houses, slums and villages, but fear lurks everywhere. The watchful eye of the consular machine watches everything…

By order “from above” Muslim self-governors were forbidden to take pictures with him. Minority radio stations, newspapers, websites are not even allowed to mention his name, and in mosques, imams give the floor and microphone only to other candidates to speak, even from the pulpit.

Even at the public gatherings of iftar (religious tables at sunset during the period of Ramadan that ended a few days ago) in the villages, the “system” did not need it. And in order to exclude him, he was not included in the “protocols of official” guests. He has not retreated and is not retreating. He went to “iftars” and just talked with his simple co-religionists. In one case, when it became known that Ahmed would go without an invitation to the iftar of Yasmos, the Turkish consul was not present!

For 45,000 votes

The 25,000 Muslim voters in Rhodope and 20,000 in Xanthi are called to cross almost exclusively by their co-religionists and very rarely by Christians.

Given that the minority party KIFI is not participating in the elections, nothing will change in terms of the presence of minorities in the new parliament. Muslim candidates are included in the lists of other prominent parties from which three were elected in the 2019 elections, two in Xanthi (SYRIZA, KINAL) and one in Rhodope (KINAL), Ilhan Ahmed. However, he does not claim exclusively the vote of his co-religionists. He is the only Muslim candidate who prints campaign materials in two languages, unlike others who only distribute leaflets in Turkish, and also visits mixed and even purely Christian villages.