The CHP's "Power" Congress

The announcements for the CHP congress to be held today have been issued as the "Power Congress." It appears that the CHP after Kılıçdaroğlu is seriously making calculations for taking power. Do not say right away that there is nothing odd about this. True, neither before nor after this congress is there any substantial road map for how power will be reached; on the contrary, the phrase "Power Congress" has more to do with the business to be done at this congress being entirely about seizing or consolidating power within the party. Although Kılıçdaroğlu says, to remove this oddity, "our aim is not power within the CHP but the CHP's power," even this statement means nothing more than underlining the matter in somewhat bolder lines.

Even so, whatever anyone says, the CHP's making calculations for power, and trying to determine new strategies within democratic limits for this, is an extremely healthy and auspicious situation.

That not only the CHP but all political parties are in such a calculation is an expression that democracy is running its normal course. For there are parties in Turkey which, though called political parties, do not aim at power at all, and the CHP heads (headed) their list. It was a somewhat odd sentence, I know, but the oddity is not from the perception settings but from the factory settings of the strategy that the CHP itself has followed until now.

In fact this strategy can be better understood if it is named after being corrected as follows. "Being in power without being in power" or "being the representative and overseer of state power over the governing powers." It must be appreciated that for such a position there is no need at all to win elections or to explain one's concerns to the people. Yet since, with the 12 September Referendum, this "CHP way" of being in power has been largely blocked, the CHP is trying to adapt, slowly though it may be, to the normal way of being in power. Toppling, even through an intrigue, its former chairmen, who never acquired any habit of explaining themselves to the people, and installing in their place a chairman who, if contact with the people is needed, carries it out with hyperactive activity, was the result of this assessment.

Once it settles the problem of power within the party, it cannot yet be said that Kılıçdaroğlu holds enough promise as to how close he can bring the CHP to power in Turkey. He has no success that nourishes him as a leader other than the strong "expectation of a chairman who will carry them to power" within the CHP base. Since he has no success against his opponents in the power struggle in Turkey, he is trying to make up for the lack of success with intra-party power moves, and each success move within the party detaches the party a little more from the power race in general politics. Because this success each time exposes more the fierce incompatibility of the sides within the party, which exhausts the expectations loaded onto the party under his leadership without its entering a race at the national level.

According to the information given by Bekir Ağırdır of KONDA on Çiğdem Anat's program on NTV, exactly half of CHP voters hold no hope that their own party can come to power; as many again have no expectation that their own party or leader can solve Turkey's problems. The CHP, which cannot light a strong ray of hope even among its own voters, received no votes at all in as many as 250 districts in the last elections, and got under 10 percent in even more.

Looking at how the AK Parti, which appears to maintain a 44 percent vote rate in Adil Gür's latest poll, does not suffer incumbent wear and tear, Taha Akyol rightly reminds that for the CHP to learn the road to power it must read this country's sociology very well.

Beyond this country's sociology, perhaps one should also recall a general principle of the sociology of politics that underlies the AK Parti's success. That is the principle of "changing oneself" that we pointed out in our last article. Politics is not a job done by waiting for the voter to discover your talents. Political opportunities are not things caught by waiting for the state or other political rivals to change their positions. Changing the attitudes of the state, of your political rivals and of the voter toward you passes, above all, through your changing yourself.

The "road to power" within the CHP will have been opened somewhat if it changes its Jacobin attitude, which has so far regarded itself as an unchanging essence and the owner of absolute truth, its people as heedless ones who need to be reformed, and its rivals as traitors trying to seduce the people.

But this change will only ensure the opening of the road. How fast it will advance on this road will of course depend both on its own performance and on that of its big rival, which has long since entered this road and covered quite a distance.