The CHP's search for an 18 Brumaire

In the history of socialism there is a very strong tradition of criticism regarding the role attributed to leadership. Karl Marx's famous The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte carried the character of a doctrinal warning that one cannot place much hope in a leader merely coming to power (usually through intrigue or a coup) before the historical and sociological conditions have formed, nor in some radical-looking changes that he has accomplished or could accomplish, nor in movements that appear socializing. This warning of Marx's, so as not to place too much hope in the name of socialism in bourgeois liberalisms or in certain changes that Bonaparte led or disrupted with his leadership abilities, and to interpret them more correctly, continues in the following pithy words:

"People make their own history, but as they please, not under circumstances of their own choosing, but under circumstances given to them and left over from the past… The tradition of all the dead generations weighs with great heaviness on the brains of the living. Even when they appear to be occupied with transforming themselves and things into another form, with creating something entirely new, especially in these epochs of revolutionary crisis they fearfully conjure up the spirits of the past in their minds, and take their names, slogans and costumes in order to appear on the new stage of history in that venerable borrowed garb and with a tongue borrowed from another."

When the left has strayed from making a proper analysis of its own society and history, it has of course kept searching for its own failures in the wrong places and for the wrong reasons. The Turkish left, especially in its historical dance with Kemalism, has never been able to rid itself of a kind of 18 Brumaire expectation. The expectation of a role from the person of Mustafa Kemal that would change all of Turkey's fate has afflicted the Turkish left with a serious malady even from the standpoint of socialist doctrine. Whatever role Mustafa Kemal had in Turkey's fate, he had it; loading onto this role the expectation of a socialist future has constituted the founding creed of the Turkish left.

Looking today at the role attributed to Kılıçdaroğlu's leadership shows that, in the person of the CHP, far more expectation is being loaded onto the leadership element of the Turkish left than is supposed. Of course it can be said that, because of its relationship with Kemalism, this has always been so, but this attribution also seems to stem somewhat from an emulation of the success of its political rivals in this matter.

More plainly, there is a stratum in the CHP that has been badly convinced of an assumption that the AK Parti owes all its success in politics to Tayyip Erdoğan's personal charisma.

Yet although the person of Tayyip Erdoğan certainly has a very important binding and driving role in the AK Parti, there is also a very strong and deeply rooted sociological ground beneath the AK Parti. If we were to listen to Marx, whom the Turkish left has neglected, we would have to say that it is not Erdoğan who brought this ground into being, but on the contrary this ground itself that made Erdoğan's charismatic leadership possible and meaningful.

Today, as Turkey's historical conditions demand conservatism, change, economic and social opening, human rights and democratization all at once, we can speak of a historical meeting with the Erdoğan personality, with its quality of responding successfully to all of these demands together.

If the charisma the CHP needs is a charisma that would truly make it an alternative to power, it cannot remain remote from the spirit of the age. Today the spirit of the age is moving in the direction of more democratization, freedoms and the development of human rights. A politics produced against this spirit would exhaust even the world's most charismatic leader in a short time and raze his charisma to the ground. Besides, although part of charisma rests on innate, God-given qualities, a not insignificant part of it rests on success. Even in Mustafa Kemal's charisma, the amount that can be attributed to his success is far greater than that attributable to his personal qualities.

Among the names who entered the Party Assembly reconstituted with Kılıçdaroğlu, Prof. Dr. Sencer Ayata, a faculty member of the ODTÜ Department of Sociology and director of the Institute of Social Sciences, with his strong sociological notion, is among the names who can best appreciate, not only within the CHP but in Turkey's general political structure, the relationship between the charisma that leadership requires and social processes. I think the CHP has the accumulated knowledge to see and read very well the conditions that will, in the processes to come, both contribute to Turkish politics and spare it from shrinking and ensure that it grows more. Although his analyses on the middle class in recent days deserve serious criticism, I see Ayata's entry into politics as an important chance both for the CHP and for Turkish politics. Still, I cannot pass without noting that he too has a thorny testing ground ahead of him regarding how he will play his role in that balance, hard to understand and grasp, between politics and the academic world. All the more so when what is at stake is the difficult political equations of the CHP…