By Halil Karaveli

Özgür Özel has so far succeeded in making the CHP an alternative to the AKP and the center-left party seems poised to unseat the AKP in the next general election. The “normalization” with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has broadened the CHP’s appeal among the electorate and has helped establish the party as a viable alternative. But dangers loom ahead and the CHP will need to be able to overcome the obstacles that reformers in Turkey normally run into.

BACKGROUND:  On May 2, Özgür Özel, the leader of the center-left Republican People’s Party (CHP) – the victor of the March 31 local elections – visited the leader of the Islamic conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP) and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at the Ankara headquarters of the AKP. The initiative came from Özel who called up Erdoğan and expressed his desire to meet with him. The decision to get together was then taken when Özel and Erdoğan briefly exchanged courtesies during a reception on the April 23 celebration of the 104th anniversary of the Turkish Grand National Assembly. This was the first time that the leaders of Turkey’s two main parties met since 2016. On June 16, Özel hosted Erdoğan at the CHP headquarters, Erdoğan’s first visit there since 2006. “Not much has changed in here,” Erdoğan commented. While that may have been true concerning the furniture at the CHP headquarters, the dialogue that Özel initiated with Erdoğan following local elections that saw the CHP emerge as the leading party in Turkey for the first time in forty seven years represents a profound change and a clear break with CHP’s stance toward Erdoğan. Former CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, whom Özel unseated at a party congress last November, held Erdoğan to be an illegitimate leader and a “dictator.” Indeed, Kılıçdaroğlu angrily disapproved of Özel’s initiative to meet with Erdoğan, saying that “you don’t negotiate with dictators, you fight them.” That was a retort to Özel’s declaration that the CHP was henceforth going to “both fight against and negotiate with the government.”  Özel’s and Erdoğan’s meetings were reportedly held in a cordial atmosphere, with the two leaders exchanging gifts. That was in itself important, even though the meetings did not yield any concrete results. Trying to divine Erdoğan’s motivations for agreeing to meet with Özel, commentators speculated that the president hoped to enlist Özel’s support for his plans to amend the constitution which prevents him from being reelected for a third term. If that indeed was the case, Erdoğan was disappointed. Özel made clear that a new constitution was not on his party’s agenda, instead inviting Erdoğan to abide by the rules of the present one before calling for its replacement. Neither was Erdoğan responsive to Özel’s demands, the release of the human rights activists, including Osman Kavala (who remain imprisoned in violation of the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights) and a raise of the minimum wage. Regarding Kavala, Erdoğan reportedly told Özel “you don’t know what he’s guilty of” while he brushed off the proposal to raise the minimum wage. The success of the anti-inflationary measures was not going to be jeopardized with “populism,” Erdoğan said.

IMPLICATIONS: Inconclusive as the meetings were destined to be, Erdoğan likely deemed that he had nothing to lose, and more to gain from agreeing to meet with Özel. The resounding defeat of his party at the local elections – at which AKP lost 1.4 million voters to the CHP – revealed that Erdoğan’s standard confrontational tactics, vilifying the CHP as a party supposedly “in cahoots” with alleged “terrorists” (a euphemism for the Kurdish political movement) no longer pays the electoral dividends it used to do. Erdoğan, ever the pragmatist, has never had any compunction in shifting course when circumstances so dictate and he seems to have concluded that he stood to gain from adopting a more conciliatory attitude. It has also been suggested by some political commentators that Erdoğan possibly contemplated forging an alliance with CHP, ditching the far right Nationalist Action Party (MHP), the AKP’s ally since 2018. It is no secret that some in the AKP are unhappy with the party’s reliance on the MHP. These dissenters tend to have a background in the Islamist National Outlook Movement from which the AKP sprang and are in many cases ethnic Kurds, and believe that the AKP’s electoral decline – especially its loss of its traditional, Kurdish base – is attributable to its adoption of MHP’s hard line Turkish nationalism. They also tend to favor more liberal policies in general and argue that a liberal turn, with a restoration of the rule of law, is necessary in order to attract Western capital and investments to save the economy, and ultimately to prevent the looming electoral defeat of the AKP in the next general election. Yet such economic-political considerations notwithstanding, breaking with the MHP is still not an option. Erdoğan owes his election – and reelection – to MHP support, and the far right party keeps the AKP in government. Besides, he has no one else to turn to. “If I were to offer myself as coalition partner, Erdoğan would come running to me, but I have no intention of sharing the responsibility for 22 years of mismanagement,” said Özel. “I am looking to take over the government after the next election,” he confidently asserted. Indeed, what Erdoğan has named the “thaw” in Turkish politics – Özel prefers to call it “normalization” – has so far clearly benefited its initiator, Özel. Even though Özel’s initiative initially caused consternation among those CHP supporters – including, notably, his embittered predecessor – whose visceral hatred of Erdoğan substitute for a political identity, he was in fact pursuing the strategy of opening to conservatives that his predecessor had initiated. This strategy aimed at changing the widespread perception of the CHP as a party for the secularist, well-to-do class that disparages lower class religious conservatives. While the governing AKP has been on electoral decline since the general elections in 2018, Erdoğan remains popular, and Özel shrewdly wooed conservative voters by stressing that he will not fail in showing due respect for the presidency and for its holder.  Özel pointed out that the meetings with Erdoğan offered CHP the “opportunity to present ourselves to pro-government voters.” “We are trying to make the CHP visible to the voters who don’t see us,” he said. Özel reminded that pro-AKP media had until recently portrayed CHP as an “accomplice of terrorists” and as a party that is “unable to solve problems and to govern.” Making the CHP an interlocutor of the president and of the government inevitably turns this perception on its head: a CHP with which Erdoğan explores possible political solutions by definition becomes respectable and is bestowed legitimacy. “I want to convey the message that we can govern this country,” Özel said. The opinion surveys confirm that that message has indeed been well received. While his critics held that Özel wasted the victory in the local elections and that he was only helping Erdoğan refurbish his tarnished standing, the surveys since the March 31 local elections consistently show that the CHP has established itself as the leading party, with 35 percent expressing support. The AKP trails the CHP with 32 percent. Moreover, 63 percent of voters state that they do not feel that there is a great distance between themselves and the CHP, with only 37 percent expressing that they feel that there is such a distance. This suggests that the CHP has become at least a potential alternative for a vast majority. It is also telling that over 45 percent trust that the CHP would manage the economy better, against 33 percent that have more trust in the AKP’s economic competence. 46 percent trust the CHP in the field of justice, with a mere 31 expressing trust in the AKP. However, the AKP is more trusted than the CHP as a manager of national security and foreign policy: 43 percent trust the AKP as the guarantor of national security against 38 percent that trust the CHP. 44 percent expresses trust in the AKP’s management of foreign policy, with 37 percent believing that the CHP would perform better. One obvious explanation is that Erdoğan enjoys widespread respect for his handling of international affairs and is seen as a world leader. And it could also well be that the CHP’s unabashedly pro-Western foreign policy orientation collides with the nationalist sensibilities of the electorate. While the AKP and the CHP are both similarly committed to Turkey’s adherence to the Western alliance, the AKP is seen as promoting a more independent Turkish stance on the world stage, with Turkey engaging with the Shanghai Cooperation Council and recently expressing a desire to join the BRICS. The CHP, in contrast, slams such overtures to the East and toward the Global South. “The only option is the EU,” Özel has stated. And in a statement that spoke of a curious lack of insight into global economic trends, Özel claimed that “People in the East are poor, and if they had a chance all would move to the West.”

CONCLUSIONS: Özgür Özel has so far succeeded in making the CHP an alternative to the AKP and the center-left party seems poised to unseat the AKP in the next general election. The CHP no longer repels religious conservatives, and it draws on the support of both Turkish nationalists and of Kurds. The CHP is now the second Kurdish party, after the pro-Kurdish DEM Party. But ensuring that the CHP remains a catch-all-party requires reconciling reformism and nationalism, attending to the democratic aspirations of the Kurds as well as to the nationalist concerns of the Turks. Squaring that circle may ultimately prove impossible. Indeed, reformers in the Turkish realm have ever since the ill-fated Ottoman attempts in the 19th century consistently failed to reconcile democratic and nationalist imperatives. Meanwhile, Özel will need to explore ways to neutralize the opposition to reform within the state. The Turkish state is by no means uniform in its approach to reforms. While the minister of finance Mehmet Şimşek seeks to reassure Western investors in his desperate hunt for capital, pledging allegiance to Turkey’s long-standing European aspirations, Erdoğan’s chief advisor Mehmet Uçum slams the “neoliberal West.” Uçum accused “global imperialism” of having orchestrated what he claimed was an attempt to lure Erdoğan away from the MHP and into forming an alliance with the CHP. “Global imperialism is seeking to bring to power a pro-Western government,” Uçum contended.  Özel recognizes the threat to “normalization”: “If the politicians don’t talk to each other, other plans will be hatched in certain secret venues,” he warned. While the “normalization” with Erdoğan has broadened the CHP’s appeal among the electorate and has helped established the party as a viable alternative, the CHP will still have to overcome the obstacles that reformers in Turkey normally run into.

Halil Karaveli is a Senior Fellow with the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program Joint Center and the Editor of the Turkey Analyst. He is the author of Why Turkey is Authoritarian: From Atatürk to Erdoğan (Pluto Press).