Istanbul Letter:There was much fanfare this week when the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) moved into its new headquarters in the Ankara district of Sogutozu. Fourteen storeys of gleaming white marble, the building is 400m (1,312ft) from its chief rivals, the Republican People's Party (CHP), whose headquarters comes complete with a protuberant 12th floor meeting room straight out of Star Trek.
But with barely five weeks to go before general elections, established parties face an unexpected threat, as hundreds of candidates run independently in an attempt to infiltrate a political system many believe is in crisis.
"Turkey's political system has never tolerated dissenting voices," says Baskin Oran, a professor who is campaigning out of a tiny office in central Istanbul. "But it only takes one voice to turn everything upside down, and we will be more than one."
Most of the flaws in the system date back to 1982, when a military junta pushed through a new constitution cementing its political influence and decimating civil society.
But it was at elections in 2002, when only two parties managed to overcome the 10 per cent vote hurdle necessary to get into parliament, that questions really began to be asked.
"The constitution talks about fair representation," says Orhan Miroglu, a senior member of Turkey's main Kurdish party, the Democratic Society Party, or DTP. "Parliament today represents barely half the votes cast."
Miroglu's party was one of the worst affected in 2002: two million votes - 6.2 per cent Turkey-wide, and up to 70 per cent in some majority-Kurdish districts - but not one MP. This time, DTP members are running as independents, and they expect to win at least 20 seats.
A left-wing party and an ultra-nationalist party have followed DTP in taking the independent road. So have a series of candidates of the sort Turkey has never seen before. There are miners, transvestites and religious-minded human rights campaigners.
Last week, at a press conference outside Istanbul's best-known brothel, two former state-employed prostitutes announced they were joining the race too, to draw attention to the appalling conditions in which their colleagues work.
"This could not have happened five years ago," Baskin Oran says.
"But with the passing of EU reforms, people who before were too frightened to speak out are beginning to make their voices heard."
Others hope independents will also be an antidote to parties that political analyst Murat Yetkin compares to "feudal states". You only have to watch a few minutes of parliamentary coverage to see what he means. At party meetings, the only one talking is the leader, often for hours. MPs, meanwhile, applaud, and hope their names will be on the list for upcoming elections.
When, last week, many of them found they hadn't been, they got little sympathy from the press. "They said nothing against their leaders' tyranny, but rebelled when their names were crossed out," daily Radikal headlined.
"If MPs whose political futures are not trapped between their party leaders' lips begin to speak up fearlessly, it can only be good for democracy," the newspaper's columnist Haluk Sahin argues.
It is too early to predict how successful independent candidates will be. But the signs are that the big parties are nervous, particularly of the DTP.
Although bitterly opposed over secularism, government and opposition combined in May to change a constitutional article on independent candidates.
On separate ballots in the past, independent candidates' names are now on the same voting slip as party candidates.
It may sound sensible enough. Esat Canan, a CHP deputy for the Kurdish district of Hakkari who left the party last month in protest at its increasing nationalism, describes the reasoning behind it as "pure cynicism".
"Illiteracy is high in the southeast, particularly among women," he explains. "When voters fill the forms in wrong, their votes can be cancelled."
He thinks the legal change is likely to backfire on the parties that pushed it through. Already, he says, people in the southeast are working hard to make sure it doesn't affect independent candidates' chances.
"You never know, literacy levels might even rise as a result," Canan says.