For those who did not hear about it until now, most likely due to the fact that foreign media are not covering such news that parents, whose children were kidnapped and forcefully recruited by the PKK terrorist organization, launched a civil resistance in front of the Peoples’ Democratic Party’s (HDP’s) Diyarbakir Provincial Office.

Following in the footsteps of a mother who was the first to call on the HDP to bring back her son, other families soon joined the sit-in protest in front of the HPD office. At the beginning of this week, the number has increased to 18 families. It is no doubt a good sign that people of Kurdish origin in Diyarbakir, who are wrongly presumed to be natural supporters of the HDP, have increased their active criticism of the PKK. Of course, the Turkish security forces’ active fight against the PKK in the last couple of years in particular and the actual state authority may be also counted as a reason for the recent resistance. Many Kurdish families are now more confident to stand up against the PKK and their political affiliates to protect their children.

In such circumstances, the usual tactic of the HDP, a political party which is based on Kurdish nationalist and separatist aspirations, is to play possum. They did not address this challenge by the families, closed the doors of their Diyarbakir office, kept silent regarding the accusations made by the families, and instead only referred to their requests as a “provocation”.

It is the method of HDP members to not to address accusations when it involves harsh criticism against the PKK’s terrorism and crimes. By this, though, the HDP indirectly confesses its clear relation to the PKK and does not openly deny it. For all readers abroad and who perhaps need a refresh; the PKK is classified as a terrorist organization in the EU and the US despite the lack of will to fight against them in both.

Although it is a puzzle worth considering why foreign correspondents and the broader Western media, who usually cover incidents in Turkey in great detail deliberately disregarded the current events in Diyarbakir, the main focus of my discussion is on the puzzle of why well known Turkish personalities stood silent regarding the current incident in Diyarbakir – both on social and conventional media.

Constantly failing to criticize and oppose to the PKK’s forcible recruitment in order to achieve short-term goals will lead Turkey’s traditional secular left nowhere in the long-run.

Before addressing the potential preferences of these well-known personalities, a clear distinction between different kinds of leftists in Turkey should be made. There is a difference between left-wing oriented people who openly sympathize with Kurdish leftist-nationalists, Kurdish Marxists and open PKK supporters of Kurdish origin, on the one hand, and the traditional secular-left Kemalists, on the other. Traditionally the secular-left Kemalists have maintained a strong nationalist approach that ruled out separatist support.

However, younger Kemalist youth are not following the traditional nationalist stance of the earlier generations and are espousing a softer tone against Kurdish separatists for pragmatic purposes. Consequently, the borders between these two camps are becoming more blurred. Given this ongoing shift, Turkish artists, writers and ‘thinkers’ who have long positioned themselves as traditional secular-left-Kemalists, are now preferring to either keep silent or openly support HDP friendly discourses in general.

Of course, a comprehensive assessment and analysis of this fundamental shift goes beyond the borders of this column, though my initial guess about this socio-political development is that there appears to be a strange concern among left-wing oriented people and its younger generation of being stigmatized as an AK Party sympathizer. In particular, the leading figures of the left-wing bloc are blinded by a prejudiced mentality that it has shifted their behavior, leading them to stay silent even towards the PKK’s crimes. Consequently, it is a phenomenon which deserves further academic research. What has led certain leftists to remain silent and reject responding to a significant criminal and humanitarian problem as was highlighted in the recent Diyarbakir resistance?

Under these circumstances, particularly reasonable left-wing supporters should start questioning the current trajectory of Turkey’s traditional nationalist leftist bloc and its political stance which is heading towards self-dissolution in the long run. Romanticizing a political party by ignoring its affiliation with a terrorist organization will undermine Turkey’s main left-wing bloc and its supporters’ trustworthiness. Constantly failing to criticize and oppose to the PKK’s forcible recruitment in order to achieve short-term goals will lead Turkey’s traditional secular left nowhere in the long-run.

The Student Oath that was mandatorily recited in primary schools at the beginning of every school day for 76 years was abolished in 2013. Then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan reminded Turkey of the situation in Europe at the time that inspired the Oath: “During the 1930s, such practices such as Hitler’s and Stalin’s were common to shape society. You can’t see any of these practices in developed countries, which muster children to recite a text containing racist slogans.”

This oath, which reads: “I am a Turk, honest and hardworking. My principle is to protect the younger, to respect the elder, to love my homeland and my nation more than myself. My ideal is to rise, to progress. My existence shall be dedicated to the Turkish existence,” was written in 1932 by then National Education Minister Resit Galip, who was referred to as a close friend by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

Recited in schools as of 1933, the oath prescribed the model citizen of the Turkish Republic. With this prescription and other additional measures in the Republic of Turkey, which was established on the renunciation of a heritage, Turkey’s 1000 years of history and identity were downplayed by disregarding that the country is the remnant of a great empire that encompassed Kurds, Circassians, Abkhasians, Muslims and non-Muslims. Excluding all the other identities, only a constructed idea of “Turkishness” was recognized as part of the efforts to establish an ethnicity-based nation state.

Following the memorandum released in 1971 by the military, the guard of the country back then, two prayer-like phrases were added to the oath. “O Great Atatürk, who had created our life of today; on the path that you have paved, in the country that you established, I swear to walk incessantly with the purposes that you have set. How happy is the one who says “I am a Turk.”

During the term of the government that was founded after the post-modern military coup on February 28, 1997, it was ordered that the oath would be recited at the beginning of every school day instead of only the first day of the week. In fact, schoolchildren were not the only group forced to recite the oath, adults imprisoned during the military junta periods were also forced to recite it for numerous times until they screamed and cried. This was done in almost every prison, including the Diyarbakir and Mamak Prison – the latter being one where most of the prisoners supported Turkist ideology.

The recital was defended by contending that the oath strengthened the younger generations’ sense of belonging to Turkish citizenship on a constitutional ground and secured administrative stability, adding that objecting to the mandatory recital in schools is not based on any scientific ground. This is what the Council of State has said in a nutshell, who issued a verdict on the application filed by the Education and Science Workers’ Union (Eğitim-Sen) five years ago for the annulment of the provision that abolished the mandatory recital of the oath.

Following the State of Council’s verdict, Pandora’s box has been opened again. Everyone has voiced their own opinion on the Student Oath according to their political affiliations. As a requirement of his party’s historical mission, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) Deputy Chair Faik Oztrak said: “As the Council of State reminded us once again, our Student Oath, which is based on Atatürk nationalism, does neither exclude any ethnicity nor aim any polarization. The oath represents the ideals of the nation and the Republic within the country’s integrity while internalizing the notions of love and respect. It symbolizes the aim of development. If there is a legal order, then the oath will be recited in schools again.”

The Parliamentary Constitution Committee Chairman and former Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag, on the other hand, responded by hinting at the tutelage regime of the old Turkey that used to be ruled by the military and the judiciary: “With the Student Oath verdict, the Council of State overstepped its limits of governing compliance with the laws, attempted to assume the position of the executive body and disregarded the discretionary power of the executive body. In brief, it avowedly violated the Constitution and the relevant law.”

Meanwhile, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahceli did not only side with the Council of State’s decision, but also targeted Bozdag in a way that evokes the 76 years of collective memory: “Mr. Bozdag can say that he is Kurdish and he is free to do so. There is no one attempting to silence him. So, he is entitled to evaluate the situation according to his own temper and disposition. The Turkish nation bestowed him a senior position. So, he cannot think of denigrating the Turkish nation.”

A journalist friend of mine once said: “Nationalism is anteroom to racism.” This disease was inflicted on our territory by the West in the guise of nationalism some 200 years ago and in the form of racism during the 1930s. The Republic of Turkey paid heavy costs for the efforts to build an ethnicity-based nation that ignores multiculturalism and diversity although it was the remnant of a grand empire.

The old Turkey was a period when the nation was reduced to only one ethnicity as prescribed in the Student Oath, multiculturalism was disregarded, and the ones not conforming to this model were not even considered proper citizens. Of course, the present situation of the country is not flawless, but the old Turkey is already left behind.

In today’s Turkey, in which 4 million Syrian refugees are hosted and more than 600 thousand Syrians are to receive education, this oath does not have any relevance or validity. In this sense, President Erdogan announced in a determined demeanor that he will not condone the practices reminiscent of the single-party period’s CHP: “Does the recital of a uniformist text by our children every morning have any sense? What is the point of criticizing our Constitution Committee Chairman through his ethnicity and disposition? You claim that you are not segregationist, but you are insulting and threatening the Constitution Committee Chairman who has been a parliamentary member and a minister. We are standing behind him.”

The Republic of Turkey commemorated its 95th anniversary on Monday 29 October. On this day in 1923, the Turkish Parliament in Ankara proclaimed the establishment of the Republic of Turkey, and Mustafa Kemal Pasha was unanimously elected as Turkey’s first president by the Turkish Parliament (It’s noteworthy to mention that President Mustafa Kemal was granted the surname “Atatürk” (Father of the Turks) in 1934 by the Turkish Parliament). Since 1924, it’s a common state tradition to celebrate “Republic Day” in Turkey and for the Turkish diaspora in other countries to celebrate abroad.

On this occasion, it would be interesting to address some strange behaviors and points that Turkish people still face in 2018. In doing so, I will emphasize some anomalies and a so-called conscious/deliberate lack of information, which is characteristic for some circles in Turkey.

Despite its multi-ethnic structure, the official name of the newly established Republic – Turkey – has been previously adopted as a synonym by the West in addressing the Ottoman State hundreds of years ago. In addition, Turkey has been a de facto republic since the establishment of the Turkish Grand National Assembly in April 1920 – during its “National Struggle” against the invaders in Anatolia.

Today, it’s a little strange that many people in Turkey are still confused in elaborating on Turkey’s recent history. Above all, there is still a lack of communication between certain kinds of political stances and their representatives. For instance, the behavior of Turkey’s certain ultra-secularist circles, which generally insist on the emphasis of the word “republic” while disregarding its additional and necessary democracy component, is meaningless.

Critical voices against Turkey’s initial single-party era, in which a liberal democratic platform with more than a single-party did not exist, are still not able to dominate the discourse. Even – and unfortunately – in academic circles, this critical point cannot be discussed in depth within a concrete and universal framework. There is interestingly still a non-critical –and perhaps a tutelage-like- domination of a Kemalist discourse and history narrative in the media, bureaucracy and academic circles.

Even though Turkey’s education standards have increased in the last 20-30 years, there is a deliberate bias that misuses the “establishment of the republic” as a political instrument to attack or at least harshly criticize groups that do not shy away with their criticism towards any kind of Kemalism. Consequently, an absurd image occurs according to which secularist-Kemalists are proudly “protecting the republic,” while all other Turkish people, who do not accept the explicit and same narrative, are allegedly acting “against the republic.”

Some go far as to abuse the republican term to insult people’s traditions and beliefs. However, it should be clear that conservative Turks do not have a problem with the (or a) “republic” (in general), nor do they have a problem with its additional and indispensable component – democracy. The latter one is generally disregarded and lacking within those circles that use the term “republic” as an aggressive slogan and reduce its meaning to a commanding person-based ideology. Thus, it’s not surprising that Kemalist circles ignore the fact that, for instance, Iran is also a republic, while there is currently no actual democracy there, and that the U.K. is not a republic, and is a functioning democracy. It seems that a quasi-deliberate lack of knowledge or a kind of fetishism with regard to the term “republic” and its universal meaning exists in Turkey today.

There’s no doubt that the establishment of the republic was an indispensable and expected outcome in Turkey’s democratization path. As one focuses on the Ottoman trajectory of democratization, it can be seen that the first parliamentary experiences had already taken place between 1876-1878 when the Ottoman Parliament was established and a new constitution was written. Despite its short lasting period, the point to be stressed and remembered here is that Turkey’s parliamentary tradition had not just fallen from the sky in 1923.

95 years after the proclamation of the Turkish Republic, many people still prefer to extremely glorify a splendiferous narrative by disregarding and playing down certain and key historical facts. But is this manipulative incline really necessary? It’s not possible to build on actual facts without any exaggerations, which consequently causes and reveals problematic situations among Turkey’s different societal sects?

Still, many people and the main opposition party in Turkey fail to address or question the single-party regime’s continuation until 1946 and ultra-glorify this time period without any kind of critical reflection. Turkey’s main opposition in particular has no will to do this although it contradicts its own “social democratic” values. Why did Turkey experience such a period while there were, for instance, more political parties, and more voices during the Ottoman constitutional monarchy between 1909-1913? A number of questions can be raised in this regard.

It should be kept in mind that in Turkey today while on the one hand there is no actual problem with the country’s republican character, on the other hand, certain secularist circles aggressively disregard its  democracy component. In my opinion, one would be less biased if one analyzes the country’s historical and institutional trajectory free from censorship (including the single-party era) and emotional-ideological illusions.

Recently, Turkey’s Council of State, which is the highest administrative court in Turkey, canceled the removal of the so-called Student Oath in Turkey’s schools. That is to say, the court reinstated the oath. Until 2013, reciting the Student Oath in the morning by students in schools was an obligatory act. Although such kind of a militarist-like scene occurred in Turkey, no political party attempted to remove this practice.

Nevertheless, during Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s third period as Prime Minister, the Student Oath was abolished on the basis that it was against the self-awareness and self-realization of students. As The New Turkey columnist Hazal Duran recently addressed in depth, Turkish children going to schools had to –and maybe once again will have to in the near future– proclaim the oath as followed:

“I am a Turk, honest, and hardworking. My principle is to protect the younger to respect the elder, to love my homeland and my nation more than myself. My ideal is to rise, to progress.

O Great Atatürk! On the path that you have paved, I swear to walk incessantly toward the aims that you have set.

My existence shall be dedicated to the Turkish existence. How happy is the one who says “I am a Turk!”

Has the Council of State acted as an executive body and de facto enabled the re-introduction of the controversial Student Oath?

In my opinion, this recent development has to be analyzed by taking into account four main points:

First of all, the question arises as to whether the Council of State has a legal basis to decide on whether an executive act, namely the removal of the Student Oath by the Turkish government in 2013, can be canceled. By this, the court acted like an executive body and de facto enabled the re-introduction of the controversial oath. It done this by ignoring the government’s field of authority and responsibility.

As several members of the ruling AK Party and legal circles rightly underscored (*> ; **), the Council of State’s decision to rule out the current regulation is based on a rather ideological and non-constitutional nature. In addition, the Council of State does not have a legal base to impose executive decisions, and the decision made does not comply with an accurate legal method.

It’s interesting that the decision on Student Oath was made at a time when the conservative democrat AK Party and the nationalist MHP were on their way to continue their alliance for the local elections in 2019.

The second point that I want to emphasize is the fact that while some circles welcomed the decision made, some groups rejected it. It’s also interesting that the decision was made at a time when Turkey’s main conservative democrat party, the AK Party, and the nationalist MHP were on their way to continue their two-year lasting alliance, this time with regard to the local elections in 2019. However, as of Tuesday it became clear that this will not happen. Disagreement on the oath issue was probably an additional factor to this.

Conservative circles and even nationalists with a conservative background and critical stance towards Kemalism protested against reinstating the Student Oath.

While MHP welcomed the decision on Student Oath, the AK Party criticized it. In this sense, this and similar issues bear a continuing conflict potential regarding the future of the fragile “People’s Alliance.” In addition, and as predicted, secular-nationalist CHP circles also welcomed the decision. Conservative circles and even nationalists with a conservative background and critical stance towards Kemalism protested against reinstating the Student Oath. Besides these main circles, Kurdish nationalist and liberals were also against the decision made.

While Kurdish nationalists particularly elaborate the oath as exclusionary, liberals reject it due to its imposing character and nature against, above all, the freedom of opinion. “While the latter one can be debated, whether we like it or not, rejecting the “Turkishness” incapsulated in the constitution is a rejection of Turkey’s constitutional citizenship feature as a modern nation state. In a similar sense, Kemalist circles deny that the Turkish identity named in the oath is racist, which is actually true.

While Kurdish nationalists particularly elaborate the Student Oath as exclusionary, liberals reject it due to its imposing character against, above all, the freedom of opinion.

But the disturbing point in this issue is whether a daily proclamation of the oath, which resembles militarist ceremonies, has to be an obligation or necessity in the education of Turkish children. It’s also a false effort to equate the constitutional Turkishness with ethnic identities. But this interesting topic would go beyond the borders of this column and one would have to make additional comparisons with other democratic nation states such as Germany or France, where similar identities are used.

My third point about the Student Oath’s main controversial aspect has to be elaborated and addressed openly in a more critical way. We should be able to do this in the year of 2018. Unfortunately though, this is still – deliberately – disregarded by all major actors. Namely, the reference to a person-based imposed ideology. One might start to ask whether we know any other democratic countries in the world, which have similar constitutional and other ceremonial references to a similar person-based ideology.

The last and final point is about the western media’s disregard and ignorant bias in the past couple of days. While we are generally used to expecting many articles addressing and criticizing Turkey’s judicial system, there have been no critical pieces published that address the court’s anti-democratic decision. It seems that in cases when a decision made by the Erdogan administration is ruled out by a judicial body, those western media outlets stay silent.

No critical voice has questioned why the judiciary acts against the government, or why the Turkish judiciary still acts in an entrenched (Kemalist) ideological way. Thus, the question should be why these media outlets do not criticize this ideological and legally-baseless decision, while falsely associating every judicial decision in Turkey with the President himself. Nevertheless, people in Western countries and those interested in Turkish politics should take these ambivalent and contradictory approaches into account when analyzing Turkey. For this, it would be an advantage to know the country’s complicated dynamics.

A couple of days ago, the Council of State in Turkey made a controversial decision and canceled the removal of Student Oath in schools. Until 2013, reciting the Student Oath in schools was an obligation at the beginning of each school day. The reason behind its removal in schools was justified with it being against the self-awareness and self-realization of students by imposing specific values.

Each student had to proclaim the oath, whose 1997 version reads the following:

“I am a Turk, honest, and hardworking. My principle is to protect the younger to respect the elder, to love my homeland and my nation more than myself. My ideal is to rise, to progress.

O Great Atatürk ! On the path that you have paved, I swear to walk incessantly toward the aims that you have set.

My existence shall be dedicated to the Turkish existence. How happy is the one who says “I am a Turk!”

After the decision made by the Council of State, the issue has been discussed through various dimensions. On the one side, there are supporters of the decision, believing that the Student Oath is necessary in order to safeguard nationalist and Republican values. Some circles view the decision of the Council of State as a revival of the Kemalist ideology in Turkey, while some others focus on how it provides nationalist sentiment among Turkish children. Members of these groups insist on the revival of the Student Oath although the judicial process has not yet ended.

On the other side, there are opponents of the decision, who believe that this will create deficiencies on the rational thinking capabilities of children, by forcing them to obey the rules and commit their “assigned duties.” Some in this group underline the deep-rooted effects of collectivism on their generation and the dilemma between their feelings and imposed ideas, which caused bigger troubles for them in the following years of their lives.

Women who I have spoken to harshly criticize the decision made: “Are we going to promote self-development and individuality or top-down values on children? Since the practices of the early Republican period forcefully focused on the understanding of top-down and unilateral values, this oath does not create individuals that are capable of internalizing rational decision-making in their lives. If the decision of the Council of the State is implemented, the following generations will also carry this burden.”

Some people in this circle are also uncomfortable with the nationalistic emphasis in the text. The oath was originally written in 1933, at a time when the nationalist tendencies were on the rise in Europe, as well as in Turkey. Some opponents pay attention to this fact and state that there is a necessity for a major revision in the nature of the text if the sides insist on its obligation. While the original text has been subject to major changes, these did not transform the substance and only covered the linguistic modifications of the text.

Opponents of the Student Oath are also worried about the reversal of further democratic gains, such as the removal of the headscarf ban in public spaces. The AK Party has taken significant steps towards democratization of Turkey in political, social, and economic areas. The removal of the Student Oath was one of the examples of these democratization efforts. The decision of the Council of State was perceived as taking a step back from these efforts and turning to the old habits where judicial power acted as the guard of the Kemalist regime and intervened into politics.

Even though the Council of State made a decision on the Student Oath, judicial processes have not yet ended. The Ministry of Education has appealed to the superior court and it will take some time for the final decision to be received. However, it seems that this issue will remain high on the political agenda in Turkey for a long time.

Turkey’s ruling AK Party is often criticized by its opponents for being not rational. However, the accusation that the AK Party is not rational does not stem from the party’s failure to follow the objective rules of politics, or realpolitik. It seems rather to rest on a sense of frustration, which stems from the AK Party’s distance with or reluctance to embrace specific socio-political ideals.

Indeed, the debate around rationality in Turkish politics is of ideological nature. That is, being rational is not measured with the compatibility of actions of political actors vis-à-vis the dictums of realpolitik. It presents an ideological struggle, which is shaped around competing political actors who strive to bend the will of their rivals and make their will triumphant.

Nothing is truer than to put forward that in Turkey we witness a harsh competition between alternative rationalities. It used to be between “modernist” Kemalism and its “traditional” competitors. Resting on modernization theory, Kemalist actors tended to accuse their rivals irrational on the basis of their religiosity or cultural “backwardness”. The start of the globalization process and the postmodern turn in the late twentieth century put an end to the domination of modernization theory. This was a game-changer for Turkish politics. The Kemalists lost their leverage against their political rivals. From then on, Kemalists appeared to be irrational and outdated since the standard of rationality began to be defined with reference to liberal-democracy.

The liberal-democratic rationality emphasized the primacy of the individual to the collective, the primacy of civil society to the state, the primacy of economics to the political, and the primacy of reason to the feelings such as the love of one’s own country or community. Under liberal-democratic hegemony, the political actors were regarded rational as long as they support the former in this chain of opposition. The Kemalists did the reverse and eventually lost the ideological battle.

From 2010 onwards, the hegemony of liberal-democracy began to be shaken and a new competition begun. In this competition the primary contenders became liberal and democratic rationalities. The democratic rationality put forward a new framework, which reverses the equilibrium in favor of the collective vis-à-vis the individual, the state vis-à-vis civil society, the political vis-à-vis economics, group feelings vis-à-vis formal reason. It underlines what is concrete, substantial and particular in the face of what is abstract, formal and universal.

Today, Turkish politics is primarily determined by this competition between liberal and democratic rationalities. Whereas the AK Party follows the latter, the opposition champions the former. The AK Party proposes the politics of native-national, which is a project of political unity shaped around a particular conception of good. The opposition, as a response, raises the issue of the importance of the rights and attempts to disparage and dislocate the political unity offered by the politics of native-national. Refusing democratic rationality, the opposition naturally does not offer a positive political project.

This refusal of democratic rationality reduces the chances of winning the upcoming elections on 24 June. This is because the political process in Turkey has been shaped by the struggle to adapt the masses (society) into the political order, which was for a long time under the control of bureaucratic oligarchy. Political actors that seek to win elections have to respond to that basic demand in society. And in order to do that, they are supposed to embrace democratic rationality.

Alongside this domestic factor, democratic rationality has started to weigh heavier than liberal rationality due to international developments. The decline of globalization and the return of realpolitik in international politics increases the importance of democratic rationality, which underlines the collective, state, political and the group feelings. This change, too, plays against the opposition’s hands. All in all, these domestic and international factors make the AK Party more rational than the opposition.

Two weeks ago, I pointed out that the opposition parties have to decide whom they will nominate as their candidate for president in the upcoming elections and what their ambitions are regarding the elections on June 24. Now, it seems that at least the presidential candidate issue has been solved among the opposition parties. In the process of finding a presidential candidate, the most discussed option was to nominate a person who will run as a common candidate of all major opposition parties. However, several maneuvers and attempts to persuade each other ultimately failed, which then consequently caused a situation in which all opposition parties nominated their parties’ own candidate and even each party’s leader with one exception – the Republican People’s Party, CHP.

Even though CHP’s MP Muharrem Ince challenged the CHP’s incumbent chairman Kemal Kilicdaroglu, who lost eight elections in eight years, twice, he has been nominated as the party’s presidential candidate. Interestingly, Ince had stated during the last party congress in February that, “the CHP’s chairman is the party’s natural presidential candidate… If you want to rule the party while someone should rule the country, then, why are you the chairman?”

Nevertheless, it seems that in contrast to other opposition party leaders, the CHP chairman did not dare to compete as a candidate against the AK Party’s candidate, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. While all major Turkish political parties nominated their de jure or de facto party leader as their presidential candidate, the CHP preferred a strange move that does not aim to win the elections but rather to guarantee Kilicdaroglu’s political future. It’s likely that the CHP leader does not want to risk his position as both a future MP in the new assembly and party chairman. Kilicdaroglu’s move to nominate Ince may though hamper his future ambitions. As Burhanettin Duran stressed, independent from the election results, Ince may cause serious troubles for Kilicdaroglu. Actually, it’s very unlikely – but – if Ince gains any success as a presidential candidate, he will directly try to control his party by challenging Kilicdaroglu’s one-man party leadership.

Besides these political anomalies among the left-nationalist secularists of Turkey, one statement by Ince during his speech at his nomination ceremony was striking. Ince said he would not only represent the CHP’s supporters but all of Turkey’s 80 million citizens. By this, Ince removed his CHP lapel pin to put on a Turkish flag pin as a symbol for neutrality by stating, “We will be impartial/unbiased. We will be independent.” On the other hand, he called his party supporters by saying, “This time we want the ruling power!” Consequently, all the CHP supporters echoed in the hall “power, power, power…”

First of all, it’s quite absurd to have the ambition to win the executive presidency in a presidential system by stressing the party as “we want…” while on the other hand promising to be unbiased or impartial. Thus, the question arises as to how an unbiased president will appoint his ministers? Or even more concrete, how does a Kemalist MP since 2002 plan to rule the country without preferring his party fellows in the next five years and who will believe in these dubious statements?

Moreover, in both democratic presidential and semi-presidential systems, the head of state is the executive lead of the government, who, as a consequence, actively rules the country by following a concrete government program. For instance, neither Mr. Trump as an example of the presidential system nor Mr. Macron as an example of the semi-presidential system are impartial personalities. In addition, Mr. Macron is the de facto leader of his presidential party “En Marche!” holding the majority in the French parliament, too. Stressing an alleged unbiasedness to any party means that the party or the person has no concrete perception of what will be done in the next period.

As I already addressed above, the CHP has to decide what the party actually wants to achieve. Either winning the presidential elections –and the parliamentary majority– to govern the country under the new system by offering Turkish citizens a certain program, or, trying to bring back the old system in which previous presidents also used alleged “impartial” discourses, but preferred strong pro-tutelage positions. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, Ince may challenge the incumbent CHP leader Kilicdaroglu due to his –rather unlikely– limited success during the presidential election. This would be a miscalculation by Kilicdaroglu who wants to get rid of Ince by nominating him as the party’s presidential candidate. On the other hand, in the case of a rather obvious unsuccessful experience for Ince, that is to say, if the CHP loses the presidential race, Kilicdaroglu will most probably still stay in the new parliament as the party’s leader while Ince will quit his political career. The next month and a half will show us more.

11 years ago, during this time of the year, the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) leader and then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared his party’s presidential candidate as “My brother, Mr. Abdullah Gul.” Kemalists poured into the streets with flags in their hands upon the announcement. The daily newspaper Cumhuriyet started a campaign with the slogan “Are you aware of the danger?” They organized “Republican rallies” across Turkey, which set off in Ankara on April 14, 2007, continued in Izmir and Istanbul, and ended in Samsun. The rallies lasted for weeks. An observer viewing how they waved their flags might have easily assumed that they were revolting against a foreign invasion. The protesters were asserting that Abdullah Gul could not occupy the presidential seat as his wife was wearing headscarf, an unspeakable “thing” for Kemalists.

Turkey was under military tutelage at the time. So, the judicial and political bodies of this system cooperated with the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) to bar Gul’s presidency with the threats of staging a military coup. Led by a judicial member, they showed a constitutional rule as an impediment to Gul’s presidency by subverting its meaning even though it was an articulate rule. They put forward the argument that “at least 367 deputies must be present in the Parliament to elect Gul,” and the CHP boycotted the election.

The Turkish Armed Forces (TSK), which staged a “postmodern” coup on February 28, 1997, released an “e-memorandum” on its official website on April 27, 2007. Their addressees received the message. A group of CHP deputies, including the incumbent party chair Kemal Kilicdaroglu, applied to the Constitutional Court for the cancellation of the elections. With a scandalous decision, the court cancelled the elections in line with the message given. For the first time in Turkey, a government did not succumb to the military’s attempt to design the politics in the country and decided to hold early elections. The AK Party had a landslide victory by receiving 47 percent of the vote share and Gul was eventually elected as President.

11 years has passed since then. Those who were then mobilized to prevent Gul’s presidency only because he was from a conservative background and his wife wore a headscarf have lately been mobilized to present Gul as a presidential candidate to run against Erdogan. Also, Gul allegedly demanded behind the scenes that he will run for presidency only if he secures the support of all the oppositional groups, namely the CHP, newly-founded Iyi Party (Good Party), the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) and Felicity Party (SP). Kilicdaroglu, the leader of CHP, which is the stronghold of Kemalist and secularist tradition in Turkey, went from door to door and exerted utmost efforts to nominate Gul as the joint candidate of the opposition. He even transferred 15 CHP deputies to Meral Aksener’s Iyi Party over a legal uncertainty regarding whether Iyi Party could meet the requirements to join the elections. The 15 deputies obeyed the order of their chairman and embarked on an ambiguous path.

Akşener remarked that she considered this move of the CHP worth all kinds of appreciation. But the situation of the HDP needed to be calculated more meticulously due to the political agenda. As the HDP deputy Ahmet Turk stated, the HDP’s inclusion in the joint opposition movement will undermine the bloc during the first round, so it is formulated that the former co-chairman Selahattin Demirtas will initially be presented as the HDP candidate and the party will join the bloc in the second round. Their calculations seemed to have been completed. And after the transfer of 15 deputies, Aksener was naturally the one from whom sacrifice was expected. Along with Temel Karamollaoglu, the leader of the SP, the late Necmettin Erbakan’s party who received 0.50 percent of vote at the latest election, Kilicdaroglu asked Aksener to waive her candidacy. But Aksener, known to be a politician driven by her ambitions, responded “absolutely no” to this offer. Thus, the joint opposition bloc they strived to build eventually collapsed on the CHP. The party was confronted by chaos when the names inside the party and among the party base raised their voices since they opposed to Gul’s candidacy.

Kilicdaroglu started looking for a new candidate for Turkey, which will be governed with a new governmental system following the June 24 elections. According to the CHP Deputy Group Chairman Engin Altay, they will announce their candidate between May 1 and 5. According to another statement issued by the party, the main criterion they look for in a candidate is definite although there is not any certain name yet. “A candidate to drive Erdogan mad,” as they put it.

While rushing to present Gul as their candidate, the main opposition party resigned to the sociological reality of Turkey. But as always, it pursued an opportunistic path instead of revising itself in view of sociological realities and issues on Turkey’s agenda, just as they made a strategic partnership with the HDP in 2015. As a result, over the course of the past seven years, Kilicdaroglu’s CHP differed from former party leader Deniz Baykal’s CHP in this aspect: “What is social democracy? Kemalism is over, long live opportunism!” As for Gul, there remains no need to write about his position.

From left to right all political actors in Turkey concede that Turkish politics has recently entered into a post-Kemalist era. Indeed, Kemalism, which was once the official ideology and ruling force, has gradually lost its political appeal and central place in the country’s political life in recent years. This has come after a series of developments in domestic, regional and international realms. These developments have led to a historical structural transformation in Turkish politics. Yet what were those structures and how did they collapse?

Kemalist politics can be summed up by three overlapping ideals. First of all, in internal politics it sought to bring Turkish society together around a secular-nationalist identity. Since the state was to a large extent controlling the realm of politics, this attempt of unifying society was not a result of political struggles, which is a quintessential character of a democratic regime, but rather a product of a top-down imposition on society. This reveals that Kemalist rule substantially portrayed an authoritarian character.

Secondly, in its region, Kemalism supported the Westphalian-type regional order, which was formed after the collapse of the Ottoman imperial system. It principally embraced this anarchic system based on equal and autonomous sovereign units. Yet this was escorted with the strategy of estrangement. From an international realpolitik perspective, this highly idealist and ideological strategy was based on alienating the state from its vicinity in order to sustain the Kemalist regime in domestic politics.

Thirdly, on the international level, Kemalism backed a western-dominated international order. This strategy was, too, not based on an international realpolitik calculation but rather in line with protecting the Kemalist regime in domestic politics. This idealist foreign policy faced a series of periodical bottlenecks when two goals of sustaining physical survival and ideological security did not perfectly overlap. During those times, maintaining Kemalist identity posed a threat to the Turkish state’s physical security. The Cyprus crisis of the 1960s and the 1970s was a perfect example of this dilemma in Kemalist foreign policy.

The crisis of Kemalist hegemony

These inherent contradictions within Kemalist hegemony finally drove it to an organic crisis in the 1990s. Following the momentum of economic and political liberalization in Turkey, and as the realm of politics gained relative autonomy from the state, it became apparent that the secular-nationalist identity was insufficient to bring society into unity. This situation opened room for alternative voices in politics. It gave the opportunity to new political actors with competing political projects to emerge and challenge the established order. Since then, the conservatives and the Kurdish nationalists have become visible and very powerful in the country’s political life.

Combined with these internal challenges and regional developments such as the Gulf War, Turkey’s foreign policy towards its vicinity, which was shaped by the strategy of estrangement, ceased to work. The rise of conservativism and Kurdish nationalism opened up new visions in foreign policy making. Turkey was thus forced to engage in its region.

At the international level, the collapse of the Soviet Union and rising criticism towards the country’s democratic performance by the European Union led Turkey to re-define its international position. This search for a new subjectivity approach comprised of looking for an alternative alliance system to the West in order to resuscitate Turkey’s historical position shaped by the Ottoman past.

After all, the existing political order came to the brink of total collapse in the late 1990s as the political unity provided for so long by Kemalism passed into a process of dissolving. This emergent structural vacuum called for new political actors to step in and take responsibility for ruling the state. The AK Party’s quick rise was largely due to this political conjecture. The AK Party’s fifteen-years reign has achieved a radical break from the Kemalist past. It has radicalized Kemalism’s organic crisis in order to embark on providing a new political order, or the so-called “new Turkey.”

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.

Turkish politics has flared up after the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) have jointly proposed a constitutional reform bill. The reform bill seeks to move Turkey’s government system towards presidentialism. It introduces a severe system of checks and balances, or separation of powers by splitting the elections and operation of the executive and the legislative. The rationale behind this political move, as in many occasions allegedly voiced by the AK Party, is to avoid coalition governments and promote democratic politics as opposed to a bureaucracy. The AK Party asserts that coalition governments carry the danger of political instability and jeopardize democratic politics by opening up room for extra-political forces such as the bureaucracy.

Turkey’s main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), takes the lead against the reform bill. The CHP focuses on the end results of the system change and criticizes the amendment by arguing that it will turn Turkish politics into an authoritarian regime. Its main thesis is that it is likely to abolish the parliament and put an end to the republican regime. Yet, a closer look at the content of the reform bill reveals that the parliament will be intact. Nevertheless, it will lose its centrality after the center of gravity in the government system slides towards the executive. So this change does not pose a transgression on the republican order; on the contrary, it may reinforce the republican regime by boosting equality among citizens and giving a central role to the society in politics.

A closer look at the content of the reform bill reveals that the parliament will be intact.

Turkey’s Odyssey to the “Total” State

The Turkish state’s transformation from being a neutral state to a total state took place in a gradual manner. In the long nineteenth century (1808-1923), the monarchy was enervated by the bureaucracy and finally left its place to the republic in 1923. Although Turkey was established as a republic, at least in theory, it was an oligarchy in practice. So the state remained a neutral state for a long time. The bureaucratic oligarchy in Turkey might be divided into two periods. The one-party regime until 1950 and a multi-party parliamentary regime under the bureaucratic tutelage from the 1950s to the 2000s.

The general elections in 1950 were the first open and free elections of the republic. After the elections, the state opened up its doors to the society by allowing a multi-party parliament. The parliament, which used to be populated by merely the CHP, started to host the Democrat Party (DP). The DP attracted the support of the voters in the periphery and held the parliamentary majority with its successive electoral victories until the 1960 military coup.

http://thenewturkey.org/parties-politicians-and-dispositions-towards-the-july-15-coup-attempt/

The 1961 Constitution drafted after the coup redesigned the state-society relationship. It created a parliamentary system under the supervision of the bureaucratic elites. The parliamentary system under the tutelage of the bureaucracy limited the intrusions of society into the state. This was facilitated mainly by dividing the parliament into two chambers. The upper house was populated by the appointed members of the bureaucracy and served to control the lower house which hosted the representatives of the people. This was endorsed by installing more bureaucratic institutions to contain the political sphere.

The 1982 Constitution, on the other hand, redesigned the state-society relationship in a new format. It was drafted after the 1980 military coup, which came after the Kemalist state lost control of the society and that led to bloody clashes between the far-right and the far-left societal groups in the streets. The 1982 Constitution, therefore, gave emphasis to the executive branch in order to strengthen the state vis-à-vis the society. It divided executive power between the president and the cabinet of ministers. The president’s main role was to keep the cabinet and the parliament in line with the state.

After 2002, the AK Party started to dismantle the bureaucratic tutelage. The 2007 constitutional reforms introduced direct election of the president by the people. It thus transformed the presidential office from being the gate keeper of the bureaucracy to being the representative of the society. The president used to be elected by the parliament with the bureaucracy’s tacit permission. This was followed by the 2010 constitutional reforms that further curbed the bureaucratic tutelage by reforming the judiciary, especially limiting the powers of the military courts. The current reform bill seeks to continue this process of democratization by opening up the state to societal forces by moving the regime towards presidentialism.

The Crisis of the “New CHP”

The post-2002 period figures as the acceleration of Turkey’s evolution into a total state. This fundamental transformation in state-society relations has urged political parties to reconsider their political positions and discourses. The most radical change has taken place with the CHP.

Despite the fact that it has never won an open election to form a single-party government, the CHP’s secular-nationalist Kemalist ideology has always been in power. Hence, the CHP has always sided with the state in critical times against the society. It single-handedly ruled the state under a one-party regime during the period of 1923-1950. After 1950, it acted to protect the state from the intrusion of societal forces based in the periphery. Thus, it has strived to contain the parliament and placate democratic politics in order to maintain the “Kemalist” state.

The CHP’s struggle to protect the Kemalist state was carried out on the basis of its secular-nationalist ideology until around 2010.

The CHP’s struggle to protect the Kemalist state was carried out on the basis of its secular-nationalist ideology until around 2010. In 2010, the CHP not only changed its secretary general, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu replaced Deniz Baykal, but also it started to shape its politics around liberal-democratic ideology. With the liberal turn, the so-called New CHP has moved its politics from the protection of the state to the limitation of the state. More specifically, the CHP started to utilize liberal-democratic discourse in order to interrupt Turkey’s evolution to be a total state.

It has sought to form a political bloc with the anti-AK Party societal elements. The sole success of this liberal-democratic politics might be cited as the general elections held on 7 June 2015. For the first time the AK Party could not gain a parliamentary majority to form a single-party government. However, the other three political parties in the parliament also failed to carve out a coalition government. This led to a replaying of elections on 1 November 2015. The elections resulted in a landslide victory for the AK Party. This was the starting point of the crisis of the New CHP.

With the liberal turn, the so-called New CHP has moved its politics from the protection of the state to the limitation of the state.

However, this was followed by the gradual increase of terrorist attacks on Turkish soil. The PKK, the FETO, and Daesh have targeted the country. The most important breaking point was the failed coup attempt perpetrated by the Gülen terror group on 15 June 2016. After 15 June, Turkish society united against terrorism, which was dubbed as “Yenikapı Ruhu,” or the Spirit of Yenikapi, referring to a historic rally against the coup. Yet, this climate of societal unity soon ended and political parties divided into two opposing blocs. The AK Party and the MHP joined forces on the basis of a conservative-nationalist ideology, or so-called “authentic and national” politics (“yerli ve milli” siyaset). The CHP and the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP), on the other hand, formed a tacit political bloc on the basis of a secular-leftist ideology. This has deepened the crisis of the New CHP.

The CHP-HDP bloc struggles to contain the AK Party-MHP’s joint project of reforming the state through empowering the executive by moving the government system towards presidentialism. The former constitutes the “NO” bloc whereas the latter the “YES” bloc on the current constitutional reform. If the “NO” camp loses in the coming referendum (which will probably be held in early April) and the presidential system is institutionalized, Turkey’s gradual evolution to a two-party political system around the division between conservative-nationalist and secular-leftist ideologies, which is currently underway, will continue and consolidate.

The CHP-HDP bloc struggles to contain the AK Party-MHP’s joint project of reforming the state through empowering the executive.

In this picture the CHP may stop swinging between liberal-democracy and secular-left ideologies by downgrading its emphasis on a liberal-democratic discourse, which mainly serves to limit the state and locks the CHP into being merely an opposition party. Thus, it may move secular-left ideology more into the center of its party politics. If that happens, then, it marks the end of the New CHP and perhaps causes a rift in the party’s leadership. Nevertheless, the CHP will have to take a more centrist and positive political discourse by moderating its emphasis on secular-left identity to become an alternative under Turkey’s new political conditions.