The hostile takeover of the Turkish opposition; the economy and the rule of law; the LGBTQ+ movement in Turkey; a documentary

Notebook #26

This is a regular feature in which I write about things I’ve been reading, watching, or have otherwise been thinking about.

The first item is free (it’s a bit longish today), the rest is for paid subscribers only.

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The birth of Kayyum Kemal

I’ve been writing since 2020 that the Erdoğan regime’s intent going forward was to shape the opposition. It was pretty subtle back then, but with the controversy surrounding disgraced opposition leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the regime’s hand is becoming much more visible.

I’ll go into a bit of background, assuming that not everyone is familiar with Turkish opposition politics.

A very important factor to Erdoğan’s success over the years has been the CHP’s failure. This is a party that has lost nearly all major national elections of my lifetime, and just as success begets success, failure begets failure. Sometimes you could feel the AK Party and the state apparatus it controls working behind the scenes to help the CHP in its failures, but for the most part, they were pretty spectacular at failing all on their own.

Until 2023.

Chairman Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu’s defeat in the presidential election that year was just too awful for even the CHP. In a party congress following the election, Kılıçdaroğlu lost his chair to Özgür Özel, a relatively young and energetic career politician. The CHP then won the 2024 regional elections, and İstanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu was preparing for a presidential run in 2028. It now looked like the opposition was on its way. They had major municipalities to show that they could govern, and they had strong retail politicians, including one who could challenge Erdoğan.

The presidential palace must have agreed with my assessment, and launched a broad attack against the CHP. They arrested İmamoğlu and took steps to depose Özel and replace him with someone less capable. They needed the CHP to go back to its pre-2023 loser state. So they looked into bringing back Kılıçdaroğlu. They’re now working on using the courts to cancel the 2023 party congress, thereby editing out Özel and writing Kılıçdaroğlu back in. It’s an extensive campaign of lawfare in which the regime finds key figures, puts pressure on them and their families until they admit to being witnesses of some kind of wrongdoing.

I just want to stop here and say how remarkably lazy all these regime lieutenants planning this stuff have been. I understand that Kılıçdaroğlu wants to come back, it’s relatively easy to put him back, but it looks very bad. They would have been better off finding another loser and somehow putting him in charge of the CHP. It would have been considerably more difficult, but it would have maintained the veneer of progress in opposition circles.

People are now speculating that Kılıçdaroğlu was in Erdoğan’s pocket all along. It was clear that he elbowed away Ankara mayor Mansur Yavaş and İstanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu as potential candidates for the presidency in 2023. Both polled much higher than he did. He voted to lift HDP co-chairman Selahattin Demirtaş’s parliamentary immunity in 2016. His career was made possible by using party laws against politicians who were much abler and more popular than he has ever been.

It’s deeply embarrassing to the opposition that the man it puts its hopes in during the 2023 election is now so brazenly betraying it now. I think that’s going to make the reaction in opposition circles especially strong.

The regime media have been gloating and defending Kılıçdaroğlu. There’s editorials and TV specials about how badly Kılıdaroğlu is being treated, and how he has been cheated out of his job. Opposition elites have been trying to talk Kılıçdaroğlu out of the move. İmamoğlu even talked to him when Kılıdaroğlu visited him in jail, but couldn’t persuade him. I don’t think voters are confused about this. The hashtag #KayyumKemal, with “kayyum” being the word for “state-appointed caretaker,” has been trending for some time.

There’s going to be a court session held tomorrow, on June 30, on the validity of the 2023 CHP party congress. I don’t know if they’ll announce a decision right away. But the way things are going, sooner or later, Kılıçdaroğlu will be re-appointed as the head of the CHP. This will mean that public support for the party will collapse. Some of its elites will probably stay, while others will have to look for other parties to join. I don’t think the palace will allow for a new party to be formed. I followed the 2016-2017 founding of the IYI party intimately, since I was acting as a consultant for Meral Akşener (who, by the way, kept telling people that Kılıçdaroğlu was a Machiavellian piece of s**t, but nobody believed her) so am familiar with the legal shenanigans at their disposal.