[OPINION] Fear of the polls: the deep irony of Turkish politics

Dogan Ertuğrul*

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has now effectively placed his former rival Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, whom he derided for years as the “general director of the CHP”, as head of Turkey’s largest opposition party.

And “placed” is the right word here.

After leading the Republican People’s Party (CHP) for 13 years, Kılıçdaroğlu lost the party leadership to Özgür Özel at the party congress in 2023. Yet, he did not return thanks to a new congress or a democratic vote. He returned following a court decision.

And not even through a court really competent in the matter. The alleged irregularities during the CHP congress should have been examined by the Supreme Electoral Council, the only authority authorized to rule on electoral disputes in Türkiye. Instead, the 36th Civil Chamber of the Ankara Regional Court of Justice, a regional appeals court, issued the decision.

The court not only declared the congress at which Özel was elected “absolutely null and void”. He also suspended the CHP’s elected leadership as an interim measure and reinstalled Kılıçdaroğlu as president.

The politician that Erdoğan had publicly ridiculed and humiliated for years as “Mr. Kemal” was brought back to power by the courts.

And all this happened, as the Turkish proverb says, before the eyes of the world.

Let’s call things by their proper name: narrow legal debates about this process completely miss the point. Anyone who views this as a simple legal dispute is already viewing events through the prism that the Erdoğan government wants the public to adopt.

It is also misleading to describe Kılıçdaroğlu’s return simply as an internal CHP power struggle or party crisis.

So what is really going on here?

Why did Erdoğan bring back Kılıçdaroğlu as head of the CHP as a state-appointed administrator?

The answer is neither secret nor difficult to understand. On the evening of the ruling, Özel declared in front of television cameras: “This is happening because we made the CHP the largest party in Turkey in the last elections. Because we have a candidate, Ekrem İmamoğlu, who would beat Erdoğan in the next elections. And because we refuse to practice opposition politics on the terms of Erdoğan and the AKP, to become His Majesty’s opposition.”

Rarely have political pressure and the functioning of state power been expressed so openly. And virtually no one in Türkiye doubts the reality of this pressure.

The Turkish public now knows Erdoğan and his system quite well.

We must not forget: after Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, who was declared the CHP presidential candidate with more than 25 million signatures of support, said: “They want to bury me alive in Silivri Prison,” Özel also publicly stated:

“They tell me: if you want to remain party leader, forget İmamoğlu there. Rather than doing that, I would prefer to be in the cell next to him.”

These statements were also made publicly. In full view of the country.

What does this mean in practice?

Erdoğan, whose greatest political strength for years has been his claim to legitimacy through elections, has seen his biggest rival jailed on charges ranging from corruption and organized crime to espionage. İmamoğlu is a politician who, according to almost all opinion polls, would probably beat him at the polls.

Subsequently, the leadership of the opposition party that had nominated İmamoğlu was effectively replaced by a politically privileged figure.

This is what happened.

Ongoing corruption investigations targeting CHP-led municipalities, whether or not the accusations are substantiated, primarily serve to create the impression of infighting within the party and obscure the political intervention itself.

Which brings us to the key question: why did Erdoğan choose this path?

Some political analysts claim that everything in Türkiye is going according to Erdoğan’s plan. According to them, Erdoğan is the only political playmaker and deliberately chose this path as a show of force, even though he had other options. The ultimate goal, they say, is to consolidate the regime while the opposition remains powerless to stop it.

I think this interpretation is too simplistic.

Yes, Erdoğan likes displays of power. It’s not a secret. But imprisoning the main opposition presidential candidate and placing the largest opposition party under political supervision may not reflect strength, but rather insecurity.

One thing seems clear: if Erdoğan truly believed he could defeat İmamoğlu at the polls or persuade the CHP to return to the role of controlled opposition, he probably would not have taken such a risky political step.

In this case, “His Majesty’s opposition” would have been enough to stabilize his presidential system.

The claim that the opposition can no longer do anything against the government is also questionable. After all, this has long been Erdoğan’s central message: “Nothing will come of this opposition anyway. »

Yet, as former Prime Minister Süleyman Demirel once said, politics is the art of creating possibilities. And every political move creates the possibility of a countermeasure.

There is no doubt that the political space for the Turkish opposition has shrunk considerably since the failed coup of July 15, 2016. State institutions, the judiciary, the media and much of civil society are now under heavy pressure or direct control from the government.

At the same time, it is equally clear that the government has failed to fully consolidate society behind it. On the contrary, social opposition continues to grow, from conservative-Islamist and nationalist circles to secular, left-wing and Kurdish voters.

In such a system, the classic instruments of parliamentary opposition inevitably weaken. But political space does not only exist within party headquarters and parliaments. And no government can definitively suppress social mobilization without ultimately resorting to open and large-scale violence.

This is precisely what Erdoğan and his power apparatus fear.

This is why Erdoğan and his main ally, Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahçeli, accuse the opposition in almost every speech of “attempting to incite street protests,” often by issuing open threats.

It is also no coincidence that pro-government circles rarely mention the example of Hungary. And when they do, the conversation almost always begins with the phrase: “Turkey is not Hungary.”

If Erdoğan also succeeds in this operation, if he manages to break the resistance of the CHP and Imamoğlu and to paralyze the opposition again politically, Turkey will take a decisive step towards a system without real elections and without an effective opposition.

Even today, the possibility of a democratic transfer of power in Türkiye hangs by a thread.

The only real source of hope at the moment is that neither Imamoğlu nor the wider social opposition has been broken despite all the pressure.

Whether this remains the case, only time will tell.

Leaderless movements have their weaknesses. But they also have a strength of their own.

*Doğan Ertuğrul is a journalist and Middle East expert. He worked as a foreign correspondent in Bulgaria, Bosnia, Greece and Cyprus from 1994 to 2000.

He also worked for Aktüel and Tempo, two Turkish news magazines, where he covered Kurdish issues and the Middle East and traveled to Iran and northern Iraq as part of these reports. He lived and worked in Lebanon from 2012 to 2014.

He has written for various newspapers on the Iranian political system and regional relations. He also edited the books “Doğunun Kadın Mirası” (The Heritage of Eastern Women) and “Doğulu Yazarlar Gözüyle İstanbul” (Istanbul in the Eyes of Oriental Writers).

Ertuğrul currently lives and works in Europe.