Having a legitimate, open and official opposition in a country is a vital indicator of democracy. In terms of concentration of power, every country has a government; the oppositions also exist in a similar fashion. Yet, in antidemocratic countries, the oppositions are obstructed and declared illegitimate through various methods. For this reason, it’s not the presence of a government that distinguishes democracy from other regimes; in fact, it’s the existence of an open and legitimate opposition that validates democracy.

In this respect, we might assert that oppositions as well as the government should have certain features in a democracy. The opposition’s duty is to keep the government in check within democratic boundaries and give the public the hope that a solution exists for each problem. This is where the government and opposition should stand. Having an open and legitimate opposition allows democracy, which is perceived as relatively unstable when compared to antidemocratic methods in the short-term, to be more stable than its alternatives on the long run.

CHP: more than an opposition

For a long time, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) has been carrying the mantle of the main opposition. Administrators of the party don’t seem troubled by this because securing more or less the same percentage of votes in every election allows the party to acquire a number of seats in the parliament and ensures them a presence in politics without too much effort. It seems that the CHP has grown accustomed to this mode of existence and doesn’t want to be disturbed. Or, maybe the party does want to break away from being the main opposition party but possibly is unable to break the cycle it created.

However the party congress held recently didn’t provide any hope for the possibility of breaking this vicious cycle. It’s the same old story for CHP and this saddens me greatly, as I believe that it is one of the most important political parties of Turkey and could contribute immensely to our democracy and our country.

What issues plague the CHP? I believe their issues could be discussed under two categories: procedures and principles.

CHP and procedures

Democracy is usually defined over the essence; however, these definitions are inadequate most of the time. They are even misleading sometimes. Exaggerated emphasis on the essence and every movements’ attempts to identify with democracy prevent democracy from consolidating. In order to annul this handicap, we should understand that democracy is about both procedures and principles; as it has always been the case in Turkey, we shouldn’t disregard and neglect the rules pertaining to procedure.

CHP’s democratic records are full of procedural failures. The party has pursued policies and acted in a way that cast justifiable suspicion upon its allegiance to democracy’s procedural rules in the last ten years.

Historically the CHP always sided with the junta after every coup in Turkey. The party either supported coups openly or was pleased by their realization implicitly. CHP finally distanced itself from coups during late Bülent Ecevit’s chairmanship. Unfortunately, his efforts couldn’t change the encoded values of the party; moreover, during the February 28 coup, Ecevit himself relinquished his anti-coup stance, rendering all of his efforts vain.

The CHP mentality always perceives coup d’états as a tool against democratic politics in its own favor. In recent years, the party has expanded the spectrum. CHP didn’t openly side with democracy in the fight between the legitimate government and the Gulenist criminal cult (FETO) that has been going on since February 7, 2012. It supported the Gezi Park violent protests, which was the rejection of democracy’s procedural rules by its own voter base, and incited the public. Moreover, CHP Chair Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu didn’t oppose the December 17/25 juristic coup and the party utilized the illegitimate tools FETO acquired through illegal means to attempt to depose the government.

Kılıçdaroğlu played the illegal and fabricated tapes in the Parliament. Even the July 15 coup wasn’t enough to sober up the CHP. With a late and hesitant statement, Kılıçdaroğlu expressed his opposition to the coup. A short while after, he renounced his stance. He put aside the actual coup, illogically distorted the term and called it a “civilian coup”; furthermore, he accused the government of perpetrating the coup and continues to advocate this claim, no matter how baseless it is. For this reason, CHP has to sincerely reaffirm its allegiance to democratic procedures and rules pertaining to it, showing the public that they are trustworthy.

CHP and principles

Indeed, CHP is a political party; however, this doesn’t ensure being democratic. Communists and fascists also had political parties. Therefore, the main issue is whether CHP is democratic or not.

We can’t answer this question just by looking at CHP’s party congresses, the number of candidates for chairmanship or whether certain administrators are elected by delegates. In this respect, there is a mass confusion in Turkey. Intra-party democracy and democracy as a regime are associated and usually confused with each other. Democratic-ness is determined by inter-party competition rather than intra-party. Meanwhile, a political party’s actual discourses and actions are more indicative of its democratic-ness instead of its party manifesto.

CHP usually acts like it single-handedly owns democracy, but its mentality and ideology is plagued with a myriad of issues. Firstly, the party sympathizes with putschists. This is a matter of principle as well as procedure. It could be claimed that there are certain individuals or cliques within CHP that tend to advocate for illegitimate methods of acquiring power, such as coups or violent rebellions, because the public seem to have condemned the party to a permanent impotency. This has to be acknowledged. However, there is more.

CHP’s ideology is not compatible with democracy. Let’s put the discussions about whether Kemalism is contradictory to democracy aside; the classical Kemalist understanding which dominates CHP doesn’t allow any space for principles, rules and procedures of democracy. In this respect, Kemalism is enthusiastic about creating the “ideal” individual and society through the power of the state; furthermore, it wouldn’t shy away from pruning the ethnic, religious and even the cultural majority. This actually summarizes CHP’s political history. Despite the need for an overhaul, CHP does nothing in this regard. The most CHP does is to pretend it interprets Kemalism in a way that is compatible with democracy through masterful rhetoric. Yet, it’s a challenge to persuade the public to believe this.

CHP is an ideological hodgepodge. The party’s antidemocratic mentality is also nourished by their understanding of social democracy. CHP believes social democracy is only about state intervention to economy; more importantly to the society itself. This is one of the reasons why Turkish social democrats are more antidemocratic than Turkish conservatives or even nationalists. If we leave extreme leftist parties and Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) aside, CHP has the most radical vision of a society among the three parties that have seats in the Parliament.

CHP definitely needs to shift its ideology, and thus mentality, towards democratization. Maybe expecting this to be an intra-party process is in vain and unjust. Unfortunately, such effort doesn’t exist in social democratic and Kemalist circles. Indeed, it’s becoming worse. Stuck between hatred toward Erdogan and a lack of new ideas, CHP is having a hard time putting distance between itself and violent methods. I’m not talking about the limited violence that was encountered during the Gezi Park violent protests; I’m referring to the violence employed by terrorist organizations. CHP is unable to distance itself from both PKK’s and DHKP-C’s violence. It’s unable to react in the same way as it reacted to Daesh. This situation renders CHP untrustable and dangerous in the eyes of the public.

Will CHP be able to break the vicious cycle, contribute to democracy, find solutions to problems and inspire hope in the public? I truly hope so, but it’s a tough challenge for the CHP.

A brief look into the international and domestic media coverage on Turkey, as well as the academic debate, in recent years reveals a rather bleak picture of a country divided along several fault lines, namely the seculars vs. the conservatives, Turks vs. Kurds, and the Sunni vs. the Alawites. Among these, most of the attention has been given to the divide between the conservatives and the seculars although the recent terror attacks has brought the Kurdish issue to the forefront.

Many claim that the policies of the current governing party, the Justice and Development Party (JDP), and especially the rhetoric and style of its founder and the current president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has divided the country into two camps: the conservatives who support him on one side and the seculars who oppose him on the other. The polarisation of Turkish society between these two camps is treated almost as a given both inside and outside the country.

The polarisation of Turkish society between these two camps is treated almost as a given both inside and outside the country.

Claims regarding the division of the Turkish society on the basis of adherence to Islamic values and practices are nothing new. Religion and its role in society and politics has always been a contested issue in Turkey. In the early years of the Republic, the westernisation process, especially some of the reforms initiated by the founding cadre, was met with a degree of societal backlash, which often drew harsh reactions from the state. Although the tension of those early days has subsided, the supporters of the founding ideology have always carried deep suspicions about religion and the conservative elements in Turkish society. When expounding on his ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, Samuel P. Huntington claimed that Turkey has an internal clash of civilizations, and it is a ‘country torn’ between Western civilization and its rival Islamic civilization.

However, the rise to power of the JDP in 2002 and its continuing dominance in Turkish politics gave rise to more intense claims regarding the polarisation of Turkish society. In 2007, millions of secular Turks took to the streets to prevent the election of a conservative president, a position that was first held by the founder of the Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and that was regarded as nearly sacred by many secular Turks. Again in 2010, during the constitutional amendment referendum, there was significant mobilisation and political tension between the secular opposition and the Government. Finally, in May and June 2013, the Gezi Park protests turned into a showdown between the government and the secular opposition. These protests received widespread attention outside the country and further inflamed the claims regarding the polarisation in society.

We previously assessed this claim, regarding whether social and political attitudes have become polarised in Turkish society.

We previously assessed this claim, regarding whether social and political attitudes have become polarised in Turkish society, in a study that analysed data from the period of 1990-2011, when conservative politics became more prevalent and the political scene was dominated by what we label as ‘the religiously-oriented political parties’. In this study, we used data from the World Value Surveys (1990, 2001, 2007 and 2011) and the European Value Surveys (2001 and 2009). The results of this analysis have been published in the journal Social Currents.

In doing so, we drew extensively from the ‘the culture wars’ debate in the US because of the similarity between the claims and the rigorousness of the methodology used by American social scientists to assess these claims. In the 1990s, some in the public debate claimed that American society was polarised between liberals and conservatives, which was akin to a ‘culture war’. In the early 1990s, political scientist James D. Hunter (1991) claimed that American society was divided between the ‘orthodox’ and ‘progressive’ camps, which rallied around issues such as abortion, gun control, and gay rights. During his famous speech in the 1992 Republican National Convention, presidential candidate Pat Buchanan declared that there was an ongoing war for the soul of America.

In the early 1990s, political scientist James D. Hunter (1991) claimed that American society was divided between the ‘orthodox’ and ‘progressive’ camps, which rallied around issues such as abortion, gun control, and gay rights.

In line with the empirical tradition in the American social sciences, academics approached the issue by developing measures of polarisation and testing their hypotheses with survey data rather than reaching conclusions based on circumstantial evidence, which was what was happening in the public debate in the US at the time, as well as what is happening in Turkey today.

In their seminal study, sociologist Paul DiMaggio and his colleagues defined polarisation in four dimensions: (1) if attitudes were becoming more dispersed than concentrated (the dispersion principle); (2) if attitudes were moving to separate modes (bimodality principle); (3) the extent to which opinions in one domain were dependent on opinions in other domains (the constraint principle); and (4) the extent to which individual characteristics and identities determined attitudes (the consolidation principle). When they explored these dimensions with survey data, they found no evidence of widespread polarisation between 1972 and 1994 except for views on the issue of abortion. Remarkably, they found increasing agreement on the issues of crime, racial integration, and women’s rights.

Although their methodology and findings drew some criticism, the academic research into the ‘culture wars’ debate showed that polarisation was limited to specific issues and debunked the myth of increasing division of American society into two camps based on religious conservatism. Similar claims still resurface from time to time in the popular discourse, but American sociologists seem confident that no such polarisation exists in the US.

There was some evidence that the differences increased in 2007, when political tensions were high, but these differences disappeared later.

Following this debate, we assessed the differences between the people who reported that they would vote for the religiously-oriented political parties (ROP) and those who reported a preference for secular-oriented political parties (SOP) between 1990 and 2011 in Turkey. The ROP category consisted of the three political parties established by Necmettin Erbakan, the father of conservative politics in Turkey, and his followers. We also included the current governing party JDP and the Grand Unity Party, which subscribes to what is known in Turkey as the Turkish-Islamic synthesis, to this category. The SOP category included all other political parties, including those of the center-right and the center-left, as well as the far-left and nationalist parties.

We assessed polarisation in four areas: family and sexuality, gender roles, economic and social justice, and democracy. Regarding family and sexuality, we assessed attitudes towards abortion, divorce, and homosexuality. With regard to gender roles, we assessed attitudes towards women’s participation in the labor force and working mothers. When assessing the issues of economic and social justice, we analysed attitudes towards income inequality and individual vs. government responsibility. Finally, we assessed people’s perceptions of military rule and democratic political rule.

Any polarisation that was caused by those events did not have any lasting impact. Extrapolating from this finding, we expect that the Gezi Park protests will also not have a long-lasting effect.

The results of our analyses revealed that people who voted for ROP differed only slightly in terms of their attitudes towards family and sexuality and gender roles. However, this difference in attitudes with regards to gender roles was not a pronounced difference, and there were no significant differences in attitudes towards democracy, nor in attitudes towards economic and social justice. Furthermore, there was no evidence of a steady increase in differences over time between the two groups. In fact, attitudes towards family and sexuality and gender roles moved in the same direction in both of the groups. There was some evidence that the differences increased in 2007, when political tensions were high, but these differences disappeared later.

To sum up, whatever the current tensions in the political sphere are, Turkish society is not being torn apart on the basis of religion nor its politics. As in the case of the ‘culture wars’ debate in the US, the popular claims based on circumstantial evidence cannot and should not be used to make overreaching claims about society. Some may argue that the Gezi Park protests of 2013 changed the societal dynamics significantly and created polarisation that has not been seen before. Unfortunately, our analyses did not cover the most recent period, as the relevant data are not available. However, similar claims were made during and after the 2007 protests. Any polarisation that was caused by those events did not have any lasting impact. Extrapolating from this finding, we expect that the Gezi Park protests will also not have a long-lasting effect. Also, we are in the process of planning for a data collection effort of our own in order to assess the current situation. We will be happy to utilise any secondary data that becomes available as well.