Turkey's Loyal Opposition
How deep is the rot?
I wasn’t planning on writing this, but thought I should write a brief note on the state of the opposition.
I wrote an essay in 2020 looking at the opposition from the Erdoğan regime’s point of view: what do you do if you think that almost 40% of your country (“the 30 million”) are traitors? Throwing everyone in jail isn’t going to work. Shutting down political parties tends to backfire in the long run. Elections are political spectacles, and the more dramatic they appear, the more they boost the regime’s legitimacy.
Their project, over the medium to long run, is to refashion the opposition into a “local and national” force. So I thought that the palace would cripple (not kill) the opposition with strategic arrests and a media blitz, then hollow out but maintain their party structure. That way they could keep bludgeoning them and persuade people to come on to their side. They’ve been patient and persistent in executing this strategy, and it worked out well for them. They couldn’t increase their voter base, but they maintained their 52% despite a tanking economy.
Some of the discussions since the elections make me think that the palace has been more aggressive in its attempt to take over the opposition’s party-political structure. The CHP has been hiring new consultants left and right, and many of them are young right-wing operatives. The most controversial has been Perinaz Mahpeyker Yaman, an outspoken Erdoğan supporter and AK Party member from the province of Batman.
These hires aren’t really transparent, but Yaman’s appointment became an issue when she moved into the top floors of the CHP building, demanded that she be given a room, and started yelling at people when they didn’t put her name on her office door. There’s since been a public outcry about Yaman, and my understanding is that she’s packing up her stuff. People were upset that someone who had openly spoken against the CHP in the recent past was now promoted above the heads of its longtime staff. Here’s what İsmail Saymaz had to say about it:
Do you want to be a CHP MP? Be the head of the youth wing at DEVA [Babacan’s center-right party]. Do you want to have a career in the CHP? Apply to be an AK Party MP! That’ll be enough. Going into the CHP’s provincial structure, becoming head of the province, going through bruising congresses, getting beaten up, there’s no need for any of that! O CHP followers! CHP followers in Rize, you’ve been pushed around for 70 years! What’s the use? Register with the DEVA party, you’ll be an MP in a year!
This was the case long before the elections, and it’s getting deeper now. The CHP is much more interested in working with people from the government’s orbit than they are in working with opposition forces. It would be naive to think that this is just a weakness left unexploited. Consider the below tweet by former IYI Party advisor and political scientist Burak Bilgehan Özpek. It’s very long, so I’m going to unpack it bit by bit.
With the consultant scandal, the phrase “the state wants Mr. Kemal,” which we often heard during the candidate selection process, has become clearer. Most likely, Kılıçdaroğlu believed in the assumption that the AKP was dissolving, and met with many bureaucrats, businessmen and politicians from the AKP during this process. These names supported Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu's candidacy and managed to present this as the “state's” opinion. They may have made him believe this by possibly leaking some internal news and files to Kılıçdaroğlu. Thus, Kemal Bey's candidacy could be presented as a matter of national duty, not political ambition.
In the lead-up to the elections, there was a lot of talk about how bad the economy was, and how senior bureaucrats and businesspeople were approaching Kılıçdaroğlu - in private - as a the potential future president. I know for a fact that this also happened at the middle level, so mid-level bureaucrats would approach high-ranking politicians (possible ministers) and feed them information about the dire state of the economy.
Kılıçdaroğlu probably thought that he was destroying the government from within, while recruiting many Islamists, Ülkücü and right-wingers to his party and making plans with businessmen and bureaucrats who were clearly AKP supporters. But these types of relationships go two ways. The government was blocking the path of two candidates who could defeat Erdoğan, thanks to Kılıçdaroğlu himself.
The way I read this, Özpek is speculating that Erdoğan might have sent those disgruntled bureaucrats and businesspeople Kılıçdaroğlu’s way to boost his chances against Mansur Yavaş and especially Ekrem İmamoğlu. If so, that was very smart. The Kılıçdaroğlu camp was extremely certain that the palace regime was breaking down, and that whoever was the opposition’s candidate was a shoe-in for the presidency. Nobody could shake the Kılıçdaroğlu team’s confidence on this point. The HDP also had an interest in making this point.
The election results show that the opposition has been badly manipulated. Thanks to this, Erdoğan, whose chances were greatly reduced a year ago, was able to win the elections. We are personally experiencing the painful consequences of focusing on the AKP's dissolution process and flirting with bureaucracy, instead of doing politics with the nation. I wish the focus had been on winning elections first and finding ways to form an alliance with the nation before the state.
Political brokers and brokers who claimed to represent the will of right-wing voters made money and boosted their political careers. Many bureaucrats, politicians and businessmen ensured the continuation of the current government. None of the politicians in the opposition are paying a price. We come out as the losers.
This last bit is self-explanatory.
Özpek is known for being close to İYİ Party, and his statements have caused a backlash from other opposition commentators. Most notable is Levent Gültekin, who published a video rant yesterday (god forbid anyone actually writes out their thoughts in a structured, well-edited column) saying that Akşener was just as much to blame for what happened.
He argues that Akşener had many opportunities to confront Kılıçdaroğlu on his candidacy but refused to do so because despite of what she said in public, she also didn’t want İmamoğlu or Yavaş to run. I ascribe Akşener’s conduct in the run up to the election more to bad judgement rather than outright duplicity (details here), but Gültekin argues that she actively undermined the two mayors, including in a phone call to him. He goes on to say that the entire opposition structure was in the pocket of state forces, and that none of them were out to win.
I’m not really equipped to say who’s right and who’s wrong here, or how much of the opposition’s defeat was due to its epic ineptitude and how much of it was due to government manipulation (or infiltration.) The party bosses simply should have known better. If you’re a political leader, it’s your responsibility to assess people and information and act with strategic vision. Nobody said it would be easy to beat the Erdoğan regime in an election. Of course they’ll play mind games on you. Your job is to turn the tables on them.
It’s no coincidence that the only senior politician in jail is Selahattin Demirtaş. He was probably very hard to reach for the government. He didn’t put much stock in the words of powerful people in Ankara and Istanbul, (he probably had his own oligarchs to worry about.) He was also sharper than any of the other opposition bosses. Erdoğan thought he could be dangerous and took him off the board. Smart.
The post-election state of the opposition is the culmination of a long process. People often say that the opposition, and especially the CHP, represents what’s supposed to be the cream of the crop, Turkey’s most best educated, most creative minds. For some reason though, it hasn’t been able to tap into that force and channeled it into politics.
What we are now witnessing is the disintegration of Turkey’s opposition as a party-political structure. Opposition to the regime Erdoğan has built will remain, it might even be a majority, but it won’t really find a party-political structure to represent its interests, not even in a very crude, basic way. Opposition will exist in the cultural realm, and to some extent in what used to be called civil society.