Why Turkey’s opposition is losing the culture war

On 21 May, an appeals court in Ankara removed the head of Turkey’s main opposition party, the centre-left Republican People’s Party (CHP), Özgür Özel. It did so by annulling the party’s 2023 leadership contest. The court credited the allegations that Özel’s victory was due to irregularities and misconduct, ordering that Özel should be replaced by his predecessor, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the CHP’s leader between 2010 and 2023, whom he defeated in 2023. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has now introduced an innovation to the longstanding Turkish tradition of party closures – a procedure that has, historically, primarily targeted Islamist and Kurdish parties – by appointing Kılıçdaroğlu as a trustee to lead the party that threatened to upend his regime’s monopoly on power. Turkish legal experts contested the legality of the court ruling, but Turkey’s justice system has been weaponised against the opposition.

The decision to depose Özel represents the final stage in the crackdown on the CHP that began a year ago with the arrest of the party’s presidential candidate – the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu. Since then, scores of CHP mayors have been arrested, also charged with corruption. Meanwhile, other CHP mayors have been enticed – or blackmailed – into switching to the ruling Islamic conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP). Combined, such measures have largely undone the results of the local elections in 2024 that sensationally redrew Turkey’s political map in favour of the opposition.

In those elections, President Erdoğan’s AKP lost its position as the leading party for the first time since it came to power in 2002. The CHP, which emerged as the leading party for the first time in nearly half a century, carried 35 of Turkey’s 81 provinces, compared with 21 in the previous local elections. Crucially, they were able to win most metropolitan areas while making historically unique inroads in traditionally conservative rural strongholds. The CHP has since maintained its lead in the polls, suggesting that the party was on course to victory in the next presidential and parliamentary elections scheduled for 2028.

In a conversation that I had with the CHP’s leader in Istanbul last November, Özel, a pharmacist by trade, observed that Turkey stands out by international comparison: while voters elsewhere exhibit their dissatisfaction with the established order by turning to the far right, in Turkey it is the social democratic CHP that has now become the party of choice for the anti-establishment vote. The CHP’s success is testimony to the widespread popular discontent with the AKP’s economic policies, which have impoverished the lower classes and hurt the middle class; inequalities in wealth have increased dramatically. Historically, though, Turkey has been an inhospitable terrain for the left. In one survey, two thirds of the population identified themselves as conservative, nationalist and Islamist, only 13 per cent as social democrat and socialist.

So what does Özel’s CHP stand for? ‘I don’t’ want to put off right-wing workers by brandishing a leftist banner,’ Özel has previously told me. Yet Özel, who is also a deputy chairman of the Socialist International, is an unapologetic leftist. For instance, he holds that Tony Blair and his ‘third way’ did European social democracy a great disservice by obscuring what he believes to be the defining conflict in society between ‘oppressors and oppressed’. Özel asserted that the left doesn’t have to customise its message to appeal to social conservatives, but that such constituencies can be won over with leftist policies that seek to ‘combat poverty, inequality and unemployment’.

That, however, has not always been the message of the CHP. Özel was the first leftist – and, not coincidentally, the most successful – CHP leader since the 1970s, the last time the party was on the rise.

The CHP was founded in 1923, the same year as the Turkish republic. The party was initially known as the People’s Party. It was a misnomer. The CHP’s first leader – Turkey’s founding president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk – pretended that class divisions didn’t exist in the new Turkish Republic. Instead, Atatürk asserted that the party would represent a unified people. As a matter of fact, the CHP was anything but the party of the masses that its name suggested; it was an elite coalition of modernising bureaucrats and big landowners. Its authoritarian, one-party rule lasted until 1950, when the CHP was defeated by the Democrat Party (DP) in Turkey’s first democratic election.

The DP was founded by big landowners that broke ranks with the CHP in 1946, after Atatürk’s successor as president and CHP leader, İsmet İnönü, launched a land reform in a last-minute bid to broaden the class base of the CHP and win over the poor peasantry. Ever since, the CHP has struggled to court the popular classes. The sweeping cultural changes presided over by Atatürk, which drastically limited the public visibility and role of Islam, were deeply resented by many Turkish people as a violation of their identity, bequeathing a crippling legacy of popular alienation from the CHP. It’s no coincidence that, since 1950, the CHP has emerged as the first party in only three general elections (1961, 1973 and 1977) and has never gained a majority.

By contrast, the Turkish right – in both its Islamic and secular iterations – has succeeded in winning over the popular classes by evoking the CHP’s original sin, its assault on religion, and has to great effect recast the class conflict as a cultural struggle between the people and the elite.

But when the CHP moved to the left – and reconciled with religion – it succeeded in transcending the secular-pious divide and in winning over the working class and the small peasantry. Under its charismatic leader Bülent Ecevit, the CHP reinvented itself as the party of the popular classes and the downtrodden. In 1976 the CHP officially declared itself of the democratic left. Ecevit disagreed with those progressives who held that modernity and popular religiosity were in opposition and that the pious were by definition reactionaries. Calling this the ‘historical mistake’ of Turkish leftists, he set out to reconcile the left with the people, and secular Turks with religious conservatives. In 1974, Ecevit, the only leftist to have served as head of government in Turkey, broke a taboo when he formed a short-lived coalition with the Islamist National Salvation Party (MSP) led by Necmettin Erbakan, Erdoğan’s mentor.

After his electoral success 1977, Ecevit formed a new coalition, but his government was subverted by the far right’s campaign of mass violence against the left, the active opposition of the business elite and by the military. Ecevit lost power in 1979 and the CHP has been out of government since. In 1980, the CHP was closed by the military alongside all other parties.

When the party was re-opened in 1992, it repudiated the left-populist and pro-Islamic legacy of the 1970s. The rise of Islamism in the early 1990s and the Kurdish insurgency that had started in the mid-1980s had provoked an existential angst among the urban middle class, and the re-emergent CHP pandered to their fears and prejudices. In a throwback to the Kemalist era, hailed as the lost golden age of the nation, the new-old CHP endorsed strident secularism and nationalism.

Unsurprisingly, however, neo-Kemalism proved to be a recipe for permanent exclusion from government. To revive the party’s electoral fortunes, a new leader, Kılıçdaroğlu, embraced religious conservatives. But that wasn’t enough to defeat Erdoğan, since Kılıçdaroğlu didn’t take the next, logical step of reconciling the CHP with the working class, refraining from advocating economic redistribution and the restoration of labour rights.

Özel argues that Turkey’s history shows that, whenever the state and the people are in a contest, the people always wins. There’s some truth to that. The CHP’s defeat in 1950, when it represented the state, was a first case in point. In 1983, the voters rejected the party that the military junta had set up as its successor. In 2007, they rallied massively to the AKP after the military had tried to block the election of the AKP’s presidential candidate. But the deeper lesson that Turkey’s history imparts is that the state can only be challenged successfully from the right.

The state establishment resisted the ascension of the Islamic conservative AKP, but ultimately yielded. Yet it has now twice thwarted the centre-left CHP’s rise. Although it rose to power as the agent of the people against the state elite, the AKP has become the party of the state. The CHP has made the opposite journey, but it lacks the advantage that the AKP enjoyed: an ideologically devoted and broad following in society that the state is ultimately compelled to accommodate. The bland centre-left doesn’t possess the mobilising power that Islamic conservatism – or for that matter the populist left in the 1970s – once did.

Instead, there’s a growing feeling that nothing will change and protest fatigue has set in. Unlike what was the case last year when the CHP’s presidential candidate was arrested, the judicial coup against the CHP’s leader didn’t elicit any popular protests. The prospects may not be promising, but Özel needs to rise to the occasion and endeavour to bring together a broad coalition of democrats under a new party banner, or face political oblivion. Özel is determined to wrest the party back, but if he fails, the CHP will no longer be of any use to those who aspire to restore Turkish democracy.