Politics is now a more arduous road

As of 17 April, Turkey has not merely moved to a new system of government. The package of constitutional amendments that was adopted is also having direct or indirect effects on political habits, mentality and practices in Turkey. So to speak, we are going through a complete paradigm shift at the level of political practices.

Those accustomed to looking from inside the old political paradigm are still trying to compare the concepts, institutions and habits of the new government with the concepts, institutions and habits of the old system. Yet the error one falls into when making comparisons between paradigms is inevitably fallen into here too, on this occasion.

The party-affiliated president is in essence not a distant political practice that is impossible to understand. Today, if we open our eyes and glance around us in the world, even in the most developed countries there are a number of examples of the practice of a party-affiliated president, but in Turkey some people cannot see a millimeter beyond the environment in which they were born and raised.

Our new political world will gradually see that a party-affiliated president is something that does not conflict at all with democracy, politics, political participation.

In essence, everyone must first recall what an urban legend the "impartial president," or impartial government within politics, is. To recall it, it is enough, and more than enough, to look at all the presidents of the history of the Republic of Turkey, past and present. Indeed, the founder of the Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and İsmet İnönü were directly party-affiliated, but in their time there was no other party anyway.

In fact, for this reason comparing the Presidential system adopted today with that period is not very apt either. Until 1946 there is no other party anyway, and moreover the chairman of this single party is at the same time the president.

Yet it is completely impossible and unnecessary to compare a party-affiliated presidency system in which parties and candidates compete freely every 5 years and in the end the people decide, with the "single-party" period.

Subsequently, after the 27 May coup, the president's being impartial remained a great lie that was attempted to be fed to the people of Turkey. All the presidents were partisans to the very end, and of the most fanatical kind at that. The discourse of impartiality served no purpose other than increasing the gloom of the tutelage system whose guards the presidents were.

The party-affiliated president is an arrangement that puts an end to this lie told to society, makes politics utterly transparent, and sets it on a more honest ground.

Let us state the most direct result: with the ending of a lie that has been in force in society from the start, the ground of political ethics will have been strengthened far more.

It is also inevitable that the paradigmatic transition brought about by the adoption of the Presidential system causes some tremors in the political arena. The system has now been adopted, and however much the referendum results may not sit well with some,

the decision the nation has given through the referendum will sooner or later dispel every debate, indigestion, discontent.

What remains is to seek wisely the possibilities of competing within this new system. In the meantime institutions, parties, political actors, all of them are obliged to make an adjustment to themselves. The tremor being experienced within the CHP today is a natural result of this.

In essence, even before the referendum the CHP had begun to adjust itself to the requirements of the presidential system. In order to reach 50%, the rule of the referendum, they even attended the memorial meeting of the late

Necmettin Erbakan,

whose party they had had closed down repeatedly, and opened the doors to an alliance with the Saadet Partisi. With these alliances, the political outlooks' seeing and displaying their own margins of flexibility on the matter of social and political consensus will be a practice that opens the way for the new politics still further.

Precisely because of this, whoever is elected, from now on someone in conflict with the basic values of society will have no chance of being elected. Because this is known, the name Abdullah Gül can occur to Deniz Baykal as the candidate the CHP would put up against Erdoğan. To be sure, these considerations take place outside Abdullah Gül, and Mr. Gül said he does not take them seriously, but

the fact that this name has even occurred to the CHP members gives important signals about the paradigm that will dominate the new political ground.

It is also said that the waters in the CHP have begun to boil for precisely this. With the understanding of politics up to now, putting up a candidate who is a rival to Erdoğan and the AK Parti does not seem possible. The question is asked whether Kılıçdaroğlu, as the party's chairman in the 2019 elections, will stand against Erdoğan, who will be the AK Parti chairman. If he stands and cannot win, he will also have lost the chance of being elected as a member of parliament, because one cannot be a candidate for both the Presidency and a parliamentary seat at the same time. If he does not stand, he will admit that he has already been defeated in the face of Erdoğan. This is in fact a tragic paradox that causes the opposition's discourse to lose all its credibility.

In the referendum, all of the CHP's opposition was in fact nothing but its fear of this tragic situation that would befall it.

It was weeping over its own state, but against this threat that would inevitably strike it, the CHP chose to make the nation a shield for itself.

Yet now the referendum has concluded and what it feared has befallen it.

Politics was anyway an excessively hard and arduous road for the CHP.

Even so, it had found the easy way out and was carrying on its opposition in a "few and cheap, my head without pain" mode.

Now politics has become far more arduous than before.

To succeed it will be necessary to work harder and be closer to the people.

A hard job, indeed.

Godspeed, CHP.