On Kılıçdaroğlu’s possible comeback, and economic loosening
Notebook 23
This is a weekly email on what I’ve been reading, watching, and thinking about.
There’s usually a few items on here, but I’ve been preparing for summer travels all weekend, so it’s just going to be my brief thoughts on something that the Turkish opposition is dealing with.
A big story brewing this week was that Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the disgraced leader of the CHP, wants his old job back, and he’s willing to take Erdoğan’s help to get the job.
I won’t get into the technicalities of how this might be done. Suffice it to say that determining the leader of any political party in Turkey is a matter of a party congress, and the timing and manner those congresses are held can be more or less dictated by law. So it is well within the powers of the presidential palace to restore Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu to the leadership of the main opposition party. The more interesting question is what the political consequences of this would be.
I’ve linked to it before, but if you’re going to read one thing on Kılıçdaroğlu, let it be Behlül Özkan’s paper from last year. Özkan wrote this in the wake of Kılıçdaroğlu’s calamitous 2023 presidential defeat. The climate had turned strongly against Kılıçdaroğlu, but being a diligent researcher and balanced analyst, Özkan was scrupulous about giving him credit for reforming the CHP, while also pointing to his disastrous mistakes in recent years.
The paper isn’t just a statement of the author’s opinion, but is based on actual archival research and interviews. It’s a serious treatment of Kılıçdaroğlu’s entire political career.
Özkan recently did a new Q&A on Halk TV, and there you see that even he has become much harsher on the former party chair. He’s very clear in saying that Kılıçdaroğlu has failed upwards in politics, and that he is now fully collaborating with the regime against the opposition.
And this is how people are going to see it from now on I think. In the eyes of opposition voters, Kılıçdaroğlu will be less the obdurate grandpa, and more of an outright traitor. He’ll be the symbol of the palace’s contempt for the opposition voter, an insult to their intelligence.
I used to hear weird stories from IYI party circles in 2022-2023 about how machiavellian Kılıçdaroğlu was. They were amazed at the contrast between the CHP’s soft public image and the dirty internal dynamics. Now the whole country is seeing those qualities. It’s painful to watch because this is the man who only two years ago, inspired so much hope among opposition voters.
There is precedent to this. There was a time when Devlet Bahçeli was deeply revered among the Turkic nationalists. Since he bent the knee to the Islamists, even his reputation lies in tatters among the core members of his movement. What remains of Kılıçdaroğlu’s status will be far quicker to collapse.
In 2020, I wrote an essay about how Erdoğan’s greater political goal was to transform the opposition. I’d reconsider a detail here and there, but I think it held up pretty well.
All this made me think of the cover of the satirical magazine Penguen some 15 years ago. CHP leader Deniz Baykal at the time was believed to have been a boon to Erdoğan too, but he resigned following a sex scandal. Many in the AK Party were sad to see him go, but they also had little to fear from Kılıçdaroğlu, who replaced him. Things have gone downhill from there, and many today speculate that Kılıçdaroğlu was compromised from the get-go. I don’t think that was the case, but that sort of talk will spread now. Read the Özkan piece for more on this history.
On a different note, if you’re interested in the Turkish economy, I’d recommend reading the latest by Ümit Akçay. He’s been arguing that Erdoğan’s economic plan is progressing as planned, and that we might see some loosening towards the end of 2025, which would mean greater employment levels, less discontent, and a more popular presidential palace.
Akçay has been arguing for years that the opposition should do more economic populism. Kılıçdaroğlu didn’t listen. I think his successors were getting there, but Erdoğan kept them busy with other things.