After Defeat
Turkey's opposition voters after the 2023 elections
It has been more than a month since Turkey held national elections. A thick fog has since fallen over the country’s opposition supporters. WhatsApp groups that were aflame with political slogans for the past year are suddenly reduced to the occasional weather report. Once ebullient opposition news anchors now look like they’re trying to digest a wrench. The much-feted opposition coalition is quickly dissolving.
You might think that’s the way things are in Turkey. It’s not like the country’s non-Erdoğan voting half hasn’t lost elections before. They’ll get excited again next time, you may think, and who knows, maybe they’ll do OK.
Maybe. But we think there’s something different about this defeat. It’s the loss, not only of an election, but a historic moment, a potential turning point in Republican history. The opposition thought of this moment as an epic struggle between autocracy and democratic agency. It was going to be a “where were you when…” moment, a moment when half the country felt like they were finally returning to the stage of history.
Everybody wanted different, but very tangible things. Some thought that housing prices were too high, and jobs were only being given to people with AK Party connections. People wanted political prisoners like Selahattin Demirtaş and Osman Kavala to be released, immigrants to leave, Islamist symbols to take a back seat, for the country’s secular identity to be restored. Many wanted the parliamentary system to be restored, and for the president to return to the Çankaya mansion. The campaign’s slogan was “Sana söz” meaning “I promise you” and everybody heard a different promise.
Many opposition supporters were aware that change wasn’t necessarily going to be democratic or consistent, it was about getting the country unstuck. Winning the election wasn’t a ticket to utopia, but it was going to be a breath of fresh air.
Was such a victory possible? All electoral campaigns strike an optimistic tone, but this one was on a different register. “With every defeat heaped upon defeat, there is a victory ascending” wrote Sezai Karakoç, a famous Islamist poet, and for the opposition, and particularly for CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, this was going to be that victory. His political career had been a string of defeats, and this would be the moment when they would all acquire meaning.
Years before the election, the opposition ascribed this election mythic significance. In 2021, Kılıçdaroğlu launched the phrase “geliyor gelmekte olan,” meaning “the thing that is coming is coming.” (a pleonasm that sounds a lot smoother in Turkish.) But what was the thing that was coming? Change itself, presumably, or destiny, something beyond our will or agency. One didn’t work towards said change, one simply stamped one’s approval once it had come. There was plenty of eschatological language strewn about. “This unjust system will end” ads would tell us, and a new, just order would arise.
As we got closer to the election, justice acquired a name. He wasn’t a mere political leader, he was a sage and strategic genius whose long plan was coming to fruition. CHP chairman Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu had put together an opposition coalition and despite his weak poll numbers, was preparing to challenge Erdoğan for the presidency. In a speech in January, Kılıçdaroğlu said “the day after the election, their phones will ring bitterly. At the other end will be voice: Kemal here. I am coming.” That phrase, (“Ben Kemal. Geliyorum”) became the motto of his campaign, adorning posters and social internet memes. It made it sound like Kılıçdaroğlu was a force of nature, the grim reaper of the AK Party, justice itself. The phrase is originally from a 1976 revenge thriller Hınç, where Kemal, the hero (played by Cüneyt Arkın, Turkey’s answer to Clint Eastwood) makes ominous calls to the leaders of an organized crime syndicate. He then kills them one by one, Punisher-like, until he reaches the boss.
On the night of May 14, of course, it became clear that Kılıçdaroğlu wasn’t going anywhere. Opposition neighborhoods went quiet, and voting in the runoff was a somber affair. What then twisted the blade was that Kılıçdaroğlu refused to resign. Headlines now read “Ben Kemal. Gitmiyorum” ("Kemal here. I’m not leaving.)
Reflecting on what happened on Medyascope, the cultural anthropologist Ayşe Çavdar said:
Right now there is a kind of fatigue and grief, a sort of “what just happened to us,” a struggle to understand what happened, and of course, mahcubiyet […] there’s a mahcubiyet of having gotten one’s hopes up this much, a mahcubiyet one feels of having let oneself go into the flow, the illusion.
Readers might remember that we came across “mahcubiyet” in an earlier post. We translated it as “diffidence” at the time, but the word deserves further reflection. It comes from the Arabic maḥcūb, meaning “veiled” and shares a root with “hijab.” It refers to the act of covering oneself out of shame or excess.
What was the excess of opposition voters? It was losing touch with reality, getting intoxicated with the epic story that the opposition was weaving for itself. A friend who was high up in an opposition party and campaigned across the country was convinced that the opposition would win this time. “This time was that time” he thought. The result left him perplexed:
Erdoğan got 52 percent, the opposition got 48, the same as in the last three elections. Why did we so strongly think we’d win this time? Did we only talk to one part of society? Was it the polls that manipulated us? All that could be true, but it doesn’t explain that strong feeling. It’s more that we believed in it from the beginning — as if historical process needed to be this way.
The problem wasn’t hope - politics has to be hopeful - it was an all-consuming faith.
Kılıçdaroğlu hadn’t resigned at any of his losses in his 13 years as leader of the main opposition, but this, his biggest defeat of all, surely deserved different treatment. After all, the 74-year-old had campaigned better than anyone expected. If he had stepped down, he could have counted on a great deal of sympathy. When he didn’t, it only added to the avalanche of shame.
Kılıçdaroğlu had framed the election in moral terms as one between autocracy and democracy, good against evil. He had built himself up into a leader who was above the petty ambitions of politics, someone who was going to fulfill a historic mission. Ekrem İmamoğlu, the other potential opposition candidate, wasn’t right for the job because he lacked Kılıçdaroğlu’s prophet-like qualities; he was too power-hungry, too much of a businessman, too much like Erdoğan. The next president had to reform the constitution, abolish the presidential system, empower parliament again, and then resign. You needed someone who could let go of power when that task was done and ride into the sunset. Kılıçdaroğlu was extraordinarily skilled in presenting himself as that candidate.
It’s not that morality shouldn’t be part of political life. A call for decency and civic virtue is understandable, even vital, especially in our times of democratic decay. The problem, first of all, is that Kılıçdaroğlu’s campaign relied almost solely on the moral story. In terms of substance, he timidly proposed the neoliberal policies of the 2000s, instead of advancing a radical new vision for the economy and society (a point made in a previous post, now open to all readers). Second, Kılıçdaroğlu’s moral politics doesn’t generate political mobilization, it suffocates it, elevating de-politicization into a virtue.
This functions in maddeningly circuitous ways. Kılıçdaroğlu, for example, isn’t actually saying that he’ll continue to be party chairman. He doesn’t have to. Like all party bosses in Turkey, he appoints the people who will vote for him during the party congress this summer. This means that Kılıçdaroğlu won’t put himself forward as candidate for reelection as chairman, but he’s almost certain to be put forward if he doesn’t explicitly resign.
Burak Bilgehan Özpek, an academic and vocal Kılıçdaroğlu critic, recently tweeted:
He [Kılıçdaroğlu] never runs for any office. He is constantly nominated by someone else because he finds it disgusting to [put himself forward to] be a candidate. And those who nominate him have the power to nominate candidates because they are certain to nominate Kemal bey.
This discrepancy between Kılıçdaroğlu’s high moral posture and the crushing reality of politics in the wake of defeat leaves the average opposition voter in a mix of despair and shame. “He humiliated us,” wrote a relative who was a die-hard Kılıçdaroğlu supporter in one of our WhatsApp groups, “he lost the election and he cut our tongues.” [Rezil etti bizi. Hem seçimi kaybetti hem dilimizi kesti].
The opposition voter now has a long memory of defeats, and there is no political idea that can enable her project herself into the future. All she is left with is the heaviness of the present, a present, as the historian Enzo Traverso writes, is suspended “between an unmasterable past and a denied future, between a past that ‘won’t go away’ and the future that cannot be invented or predicted.”
The political outlook is grim. Even in this tightly constricted present, the opposition voter finds that the parties she voted are unfit to represent her. The “düzen muhalefeti” (“opposition of the order,”) as some commentators now refer to most of the opposition, is in crisis. The CHP and İYİ Party have shown that they are incapable of reform. Opposition voters could seek refuge in political apathy, or they could venture to the extremes, most likely nativist parties who want to outflank the Erdogan government from the right. This disarray makes it easier for Erdoğan to shape the opposition in his nationalistic image. The president is now effectively the leader of a broad spectrum of right-wing parties. His last feat in politics could be the creation of his own opposition.