Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2024, pp. 50-51
Talking Türkiye
By Jonathan Gorvett
“SOMETIMES,” SAYS MURAT SOMER, professor of political science and international relations at Istanbul’s Ozyegin University, “you can learn more from a defeat than you can from a victory.”
For Türkiye’s embattled opposition, that may be the most hopeful take-away from last May’s electoral debacle, when—despite high expectations and opportune conditions—President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) was re-elected for an unprecedented third term.
“It was the best chance for an opposition victory since the AKP took power,” Somer adds, “but it didn’t happen.”
What exactly has been learned, however—and how Türkiye’s disparate opposition parties may be taking those lessons onboard—remains contentious.
Now though, with the clock counting down to nationwide local elections in March 2024, getting the answers right is increasingly crucial.
At those ballots, Erdogan’s AKP-led coalition will be making a determined effort to eject the center-left opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) from its current control of Türkiye’s two most populous and important cities—Istanbul and the capital, Ankara.
Erdogan’s supporters will be helped in their efforts by their control of most of the country’s media, along with many institutions of the state.
This increasingly includes the country’s judiciary, which came under unprecedented attack in November when nine Constitutional Court judges who had voted to release an opposition parliamentarian were subjected to criminal prosecution by another court.
Much is at stake, then, in the next few weeks and months.
PARTY POLITICKING
In the aftermath of May’s presidential and parliamentary defeats, the united opposition presidential candidate, CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, was widely blamed for failing to topple Erdogan.
In early November, the CHP party congress replaced him with Ozgur Ozel, a former deputy CHP parliamentary group leader.
“Ozel’s election was mainly a reflection of demands coming from the party’s base,” Berkay Mandiraci, Türkiye analyst for the International Crisis Group, told the Washington Report.
The 49-year-old Ozel is younger than many Turkish party leaders and is also an ally of the popular CHP Istanbul mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu.
Imamoglu, who is running again for mayor in the March 2024 elections, has long been a champion of change within the CHP. Founded by the Turkish Republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the CHP is the country’s oldest political party.
“Following its electoral defeat in May,” Mandiraci says, “the party base had become totally demoralized and a sense of apathy had set in. Ozel’s election as party chair could go some way to overturn that trajectory.”
At the same time, the other key Turkish opposition party is the right-wing Iyi (“Good”) Party, led by Meral Aksener.
Originally a split from the pro-Erdogan far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), Iyi joined the opposition coalition to challenge Erdogan back in May but failed to deliver conservative voters.
“The Iyi Party is frankly in a shambles,” Erdem Aydin from political risk consultants RDM told the Washington Report.
Iyi has seen a wave of resignations and defections since the May 2023 election, including top aides and senior party figures.
“They have a real identity crisis now,” says Aydin. “Compared to the MHP, they are a bit more secular and they support the opposition, while the MHP is with the government. Apart from that, there is little difference between them. The electorate therefore have trouble placing them anywhere.”
The other major opposition force is the largely ethnic Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (HEDEP). Previously called the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), the party was forced to rebrand by a pending court case likely to ban the HDP for alleged links to the illegal Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK).
HEDEP now faces a major political dilemma, however. While it continually wins local elections in the largely Kurdish southeast of the country, in 2019 Erdogan’s government banned many HDP mayors and replaced them with state administrators. The same thing may well happen after the March 2024 local elections.
“HEDEP doesn’t want this—it’s fed up with not being able to run its own municipalities,” adds Aydin. “So the logical step might be to come to some kind of understanding with the government, a rapprochement, given how the Turkish opposition hasn’t been getting anywhere.”
FUNDAMENTALS
A battle for ethnic Kurdish hearts and minds may therefore be one more obstacle for the Turkish opposition to overcome before March 2024.
Yet for some, there is a deeper problem to face, too—something that cannot be fixed just by changing leaders or tweaking the old manifesto.
“In this age of anxiety around the world, there are two broad alternatives,” says Somer. “First, populist, authoritarian parties represented by strong, charismatic personalities like Erdogan, telling people to trust them and delegate everything to them. Then, there are the people fighting against that. But if those people don’t have any new ideas, they end up defending the institutions and solutions that are in crisis—liberal democracy, free speech and the free market. Changing the leader doesn’t change this basic problem.”
Türkiye’s opposition is not the only group facing that dilemma.
Jonathan Gorvett is a free-lance writer specializing on European and Middle Eastern affairs.
