Reading, Watching #4

This is a weekly post to paid subscribers about the things I’ve been reading and watching this week.

Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu’s speeches

CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu is now officially the candidate of the opposition block. He held two short speeches this week, the first right after the formal announcement, at the party HQ, the second as his last weekly address in the CHP’s parliamentary group. I expect that these speeches are setting the tone for Kılıçdaroğlu’s presidential campaign.

I’ve translated key parts from them and written up my thoughts below.

The first speech was on Monday night. The table of six had overcome the drama over the weekend, with İYİ Party’s Meral Akşener leaving and re-joining the table. Spirits had dipped across all opposition channels over the weekend, and now soared high, anticipating victory and an end to more than two decades of AK Party rule. (For my writeup of Akşener’s reasons, click here)

Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, his wife Selvi hanım, VP candidates Ankara mayor Mansur Yavaş and İstanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu were present. Kılıçdaroğlu said that they had “embarked on a journey together,” which was significant given the events of the weekend before. As part of his agreement with Akşener, he was to keep the two mayors at the front and center throughout the process.

Here’s the part that stood out to me:

I stand before you as more than a candidate, as the representative of change [değişim]. I am with you as the representative of a collective mind that has been woven together diligently, bit by bit.

This was in reference to months of wrangling in opposition circles on who the candidate should be. Kılıçdaroğlu here is implying that people were asking the wrong question. Erdoğan’s politics is leader-centric and sharply hierarchical. Kılıçdaroğlu doesn’t want to beat him by imitating that, but by presenting the electorate with a more modest leader who delegates power to a “team of rivals.”

Then this bit:

I have a long journey behind me. I filled my pouch with the stories of [this country’s] beautiful people. Together with them, I am the candidate. We want to change this order they call fate.

Everyone who wants the $418 billion they [the Erdoğan palace] stole is a candidate. You will not only vote for me; you will vote for yourself, your loved ones and your future. This is the beginning of an all-encompassing change. We will re-establish the order we deserve.

I am not the candidate, we are all candidates.

Kılıçdaroğlu then went on to enumerate all the unfortunate people he has met in recent months, from earthquake victims to the wife of Sinan Ateş, who many believe was murdered with the tacit or active support of the MHP.

He kept repeating the phrase “I am not the candidate, we are all candidates,” or depending on how you want to translate it, “we are all the candidate.” Turkish doesn’t have definitive articles, which creates a very useful kind of ambiguity in a phrase like this.

The second speech was the one at the weekly parliamentary group meeting of the CHP:

He says at the beginning that it’s his last speech. The place is packed, it’s a very different feeling from the typical CHP events. The party is present in full. Kılıçdaroğlu starts on an emotional tone:

This podium is my home, and you are my companions on this journey. I want to look at you from this podium one last time. Welcome. You have honored us.

He is interrupted with chants of “the hope of the people is Kılıçdaroğlu!” He repeated the claim that this was his last speech from that podium. I take that to mean that if he loses the election, Kılıçdaroğlu will not remain the chairman of the CHP.

This gives Kılıçdaroğlu’s candidacy a powerful sense of finality. It made me think of something Akşener said in her angry speech on Friday:

“we have understood that small calculations that grow with defeat upon defeat have been preferred to a holy victory won by the 85 million [Turkey’s population]”

The “growth through defeat” theme is of course, an Erdoğan classic. It’s from the Sezai Karakoç poem Sevgili, specifically “with every defeat heaped upon defeat, there is a victory ascending.” That was the case for Erdoğan, who lost elections in his early years before he started winning them. Akşener was turning the phrase around, arguing that Kılıçdaroğlu’s losses weren’t leading to a great victory, they were leading nowhere at all.

Kılıçdaroğlu was smart not to respond to that speech directly. Instead, he chose to emphasize the finality of this last electoral push, which implies the same: a period of trial and error, leading up to a magnificent victory. That I think, is the feeling energizing the CHP right now, while the İYİ and HDP wings of the opposition (right and left respectively) are more cautious for various reasons.

The central part of this speech though, was this:

Being Mr. Kemal's companion is not easy, it is difficult. To be Mr. Kemal's companion is to walk in agony, to walk a long and thin road full of danger. Anything can happen to you at any moment, you leave your families every morning saying 'it is foreordained' [‘ya nasip,’ said when one is afraid of bad thing happening]. Mr. Kemal has no money. He has no palace either. Everything has happened to him, all kinds of spin operations have been made about him, but I still have the honor and privilige to walk with you on Mr. Kemal's path. We will walk together. You have decided to walk with Mr. Kemal, you have chosen this path. I have engraved this choice of yours on my heart.

Erdogan likes to call Kılıçdaroğlu “Bay Kemal,” meaning “Mr. Kemal” playing on the Western honorific rather than the Turkish form (“Kemal bey” or “sayın Kılıçdaroğlu.” I wrote about this here) It implies that Kılıçdaroğlu is foreign to the nation, drawing attention to the CHP’s past, as well as his Alevi identity.

Kılıçdaroğlu has been adopting the name for some months now. I’d argue that African Americans do something similar in the United States, taking an epithet and using it ironically to describe themselves. Kılıçdaroğlu pushes that a bit further here, using “Bay Kemal” in the third person, an extrinsic character. Bay Kemal is the non-Erdoğan, a perfect version of Kılıçdaroğlu, an amalgamation of all the people who have suffered as a result of the Erdoğan regime’s misrule.

Kılıçdaroğlu then goes on to praise all of the members of the table of six, for being wise, determined, for coming together in the country’s time of need. What’s significant here is that this is a center-left, Alevi leader of the CHP bringing together Islamist and Turkist leaders. Kılıçdaroğlu’s political project for the past decade has been to move his party away from its tight interpretation of laïcité and soften it in the eyes of the right-wing electorate. That’s why he chose Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu as his presidential candidate in 2014, and why he considered Abdullah Gül in 2018, eventually settling on Muharrem İnce, who’s from the Black Sea and has conservative flair (an older, poorer version of İmamoğlu).

Here is the ending to the speech:

Let our friends know that if we are going to die, we will die out of love for this country, and one day all this will pass and dawn will break with a sweet smile. We will look at each other, we will embrace each other, we will say 'we did it'. Forgive my trespasses [hakkınızı helal edin], my friends. With God’s name, let us begin [haydi bismillah].

Both speeches were highly emotional and very thin on policy. I find that worrisome. Kılıçdaroğlu has long focused on finding an effective counter against Erdoğan’s Kulturkampf, and I understand why, but I’m not convinced that this is a winning strategy. It all seemed pretty self-indulgent to me.

I think that the winning strategy would have been to articulate a radical new vision for the economy. It would have captured the electorate’s imagination and it would help unify his coalition partners. It should also be a future government’s priority.