The historic opportunity before the CHP

It is a fact that the clearest result that the 12 June elections have put before us is the AK Parti's victory. That some people can make even this fact a subject of debate we can brush aside as "human nature." Truly, as opposed to all the human idealism that humanism tries to sketch, human nature has such a side too. Even before miracles, human nature has the potential to interpret, see or show what it sees differently, with a thousand and one explanations or excuses. Let us not get caught up in this.

The AK Parti has a side that is integrated with Erdoğan's charismatic personality, and this is true, but it would not be right to ignore that there is an extremely strong and deep sociological ground that gave birth to this personality. This is a reality that we will have to probe more often when examining the AK Parti's situation after Erdoğan, who has already declared that this is his last election term.

On this sociological ground there are broad class masses, religious and conservative (if not in politics then in lifestyle), that have been rising in the social upheavals and mobilities that have been going on for the last 60 years. Positioned in the periphery against the center, in the lower classes against the upper classes, these masses, in the face of the resistance they encountered in their march to the center in the social change being lived, formed their own center. While pushing the limits of the existing center, they also, without waiting for this center to open its doors, formed their own alternative centers and from there created their own class diversity as well. For that reason they have created a new sociological mass that has its own wholeness to the extent that we can no longer simply call them lower classes or peripheral forces.

This situation has reached a complexity that cannot be explained with the classical categories of right-left-center or lower-upper class. This is also the reason why the analyses made about them, stuck in classical categories, miss the situation. The AK Parti's sociological ground lies much deeper than what is seen, and that is why it appears with surprises that upset all the political rote up to now.

For the part of this development concerning the AK Parti, let us for now be content with saying this.

As for the CHP, it is naturally not so easy to calculate whether it emerged from the elections successfully or unsuccessfully. Because on the surface it increased its votes by about 5 percent (2.6 percent if compared with the local elections) compared with the previous general elections. If there is an increase, there is an increase; how are we to count this as failure?

The intra-party opposition that moved hastily right after the elections (of course, headed by Baykal and his team) called on the party leadership to resign, saying that they had left the party at around 28 percent. Yet, on the one hand, the figure taken as a base (28) rests only on polls, there is no election result, and on the other hand, the CHP has in fact never seen this figure before since the eighties (including the Baykal period). Therefore, in a sense, to count Kılıçdaroğlu as a failure would literally be an injustice.

One of Kılıçdaroğlu's misfortunes, truly, is that standing against him are precisely Erdoğan and the AK Parti with this different sociological background that he and his team have never been able to notice or understand. His failure to understand it is of course a deficiency and a failure, but it does not make him worse than his predecessors. The upper limit of the votes that the old CHP received and could receive with secularism discourses emerged in 2007: 20 percent. Its abandoning it, contrary to what was supposed, did not cause a narrowing in the CHP's base; on the contrary, it showed that it could increase its votes even more.

On the other hand, it is in any case impossible for the AK Parti to be defeated, with its democratic and performance-oriented side, by a CHP that has not renewed itself, because society is never there. And for a CHP that has renewed itself, opening up a space for itself in the subjects on which the AK Parti has left very little room was not so easy either. Frankly, facing Kılıçdaroğlu in all the fields in which he would show himself is a very strong government that has proven itself by what it has done. When he builds his propaganda on belittling or denying what the government has done, he obtains no result other than losing credibility in the eyes of the people.

What remains in his hands in the end is the field of democratization, and in that field, whatever anyone says, the discourse found more than its due. But there too the problem of credibility again appeared, because what they said, which meant denying what they had done on the spot, was not enough to inspire a trust that would turn into greater support among the people.

It must not be forgotten that the only period in which the CHP, in its democratic history, was able to exceed the 40 percent band and come to power or be an alternative to the government was the seventies, in which the discourse Ecevit displayed against the 1971 memorandum, starting from within the party and turning into party politics, was the basic determining factor. We can say that the CHP has only just discovered the field of politics for power.

The aid that was accustomed to be received for power from non-political sources up to now has been cut off. The CHP has no one left to rely on other than the people, and in its first attempt it has, in my view, obtained a result not to be underestimated. For this result to continue and be completed, it must not miss the opportunities that will come before it. The new constitution work provides this first opportunity. It even offers an opportunity in this work to prove that it is more democratic than the AK Parti. Whether to make use of this opportunity or not is in Kılıçdaroğlu's hands. If he chooses the path of making use of it, he can truly be an alternative to the AK Parti; if he does not choose it, we can already tell the result of those elections too.