Baykal had been asked, “Is it possible for you to return to Chairmanship?” on a TV show, and his answer was, “Politics is a field which experiences constant changes. We cannot possibly know what will happen. There is always a surprise, obscurity in politics”…
That’s the same Baykal, who had been the architect of CHP (Republican People’s Party) being jammed in the narrowest ideological lane and is a politician who had paved the way for his party to be opted out of the parliament by reaching votes below the threshold during the 1999 elections….
That’s the same CHP, a political party, which, after all these years, has the possibility of re-appealing to Baykal…
If politics were only consisting of CHP’s arena, then there would be nothing else to say…
If the problem were only consisting of CHP’s issue, then there would be nothing else to say…
But it isn’t so…
We are talking about the main opposing party and their functions, such as forming an alternative, keeping the rulership alteration principle alive, representing democratic political mobilization; which are indispensable for “Democratic Recirculation”…
Without a doubt, one of the most important issues of Turkey, which is related to the democratic system, is the vacancy of a strong and meaningful political opposition…
Turkey has been administered by AK Party for the past 12 years. There are no doubts that the forthcoming elections will be adding another four years on top of that. 15 years, maybe even more…
Let us remind you: AK Party is acquiring more than 40 percent of vote rates from almost 70 provinces of Turkey. The number of provinces, from which they obtain less than a 10 percent, vote rate, is only 3. The number of provinces, from which they gather around 27 percent, are about 20 - 40. The number of provinces, where AK Party failed to come in first or second, is less than 10.
There are no indications that show that these rates will change in the forthcoming elections.
As for the main opposition party CHP’s votes, their vote rates are below 10 percent in around 30 provinces, which amounts to one third of Turkey. Also, their vote rates are between 10 and 20 percent in one fourth of Turkey.
There are also no indications that show that this scene will change.
In this balance, or more precisely, in this unbalance, no matter what anyone says, AK Party’s successes have an important share in this. The “economic equalization, which comes with economic success, the “social equalization”, which comes with a denominational disruption including the demilitarization in the state system, and the “increase of communal self-confidence”, which comes with a different foreign policy, are between those. Also, the positive conjuncture wind, which had been blowing non-stop until 2010, plays an important role in this. However, especially with the “no-politics” prison that CHP is in, CHP’s resistance against change, and CHP’s representation of status-quo and a narrow scope against the expanding of the rulership circle and political field, have a great share in the formation of this dominant party image.
Behind this lies the communitarian political perceptivity. The segregation of neo-nationalists, Kılıçdaroğlu’s “one step forward, two steps back” steps and the continuation of Baykal’s Chairmanship expectation are showing us that CHP’s political perceptivity is still essentially resting on an “internally-targeted rulership fight”. The competition and rivalry with other actors and political parties are actually fulfilling the function of “feeding this internal political fight” for CHP.
Today CHP is still maintaining the pragmatist immemorial understanding, which we had inherited from the Ottoman nations’ system and which identifies politics as the activity of a political actor expanding his/her private field within his/her community and expanding that community’s living space to the detriment of others for this objective….
For years, CHP has been experiencing this story of internal tensions, communions and translocations, which doesn’t have a meaning for the community and doesn’t have a correspondent in politics, because of these bad genes they have.
This is an egregious but real contradiction for a modernist politician.
If Turkish politics fail to overcome this contradiction and if this opposition party issue is not solved, then any advancement in democracy will always fall short.
