The CHP has been kidnapped, the CHP has kidnapped

It seems Kılıçdaroğlu has taken this thing called Stockholm syndrome more seriously than necessary. He really believes that the AK Parti gets votes from the people it has indeed tormented in proportion to how much it has tormented them. With the crisis he has planted on Turkey's agenda at the start of the new term of the TBMM, is he trying to gather sympathy among society by himself making the people of Turkey truly suffer, or what?

By provoking an oath crisis, he is in a way behaving like airplane hijackers who use their jailed friends. It is also quite clear that he is not doing this of his own will. Therefore the CHP has in fact already been hijacked beforehand, and there are things it must do in order to remain free. Among these things there are strange behaviors that we ordinary people, looking from outside, can never understand. We can never understand which politics the CHP is pursuing for the benefit of which party. All that remains for us is to watch in amazement politics in which there is no visible benefit, consistency or discursive continuity.

The CHP has been hijacked. Probably for this reason, it is now trying to do what its hijackers want. And for this it is trying to hijack Turkish democracy. By hijacking democracy, it demands ransom from democracy's owners (from society, and from the governing party that society alone brought to power). Yet even within the limits of this metaphor, the CHP appears to have made a great strategic mistake. For the party it has hijacked in order to demand ransom is its own party. There is no chance that the move it has made will harm either the AK Parti or Turkish democracy.

In the past it would have done this kind of act by hijacking other parties, for example by pitting them against the guardians of the secular or unitary regime. Now, however, it knows that no help will come to it from the institutions it trusted. With the support it wanted from the judiciary, which was directly its backyard, it could have opposition parties closed down, and it could have the judges and prosecutors it wanted appointed to the courts it wanted. Now it wants the prime minister to do the same. When the prime minister says "I cannot interfere in the judiciary," it says in the sense of "don't make us laugh" that it does not find this answer convincing. They want the prime minister to openly interfere in the judiciary.

In the end, the first target of the action they have undertaken even to be able to voice these demands is parliament. They target the legitimacy of parliament, but in the process they also show that they have no power left as a sanction other than renouncing their own rights. They threaten to destroy themselves if their demands are not met.

In the history of the CHP there are examples of every kind of alliance outside parliament and against parliament. More recently, when taking to the Constitutional Court a constitutional amendment passed with the votes of 411 parliamentarians, it saw no objection in thereby handing over the legislative authority of parliament to the AYM. When its alliance with earlier coups is recalled, this can be seen as a consistent link in the tradition of actions against parliament. Yet earlier the CHP had an abundant number of instruments it could use against parliament. That today it has no weapon or instrument left to use against the same parliament other than its own existence is truly an ill omen.

It makes participation in the work of the Assembly, to which it was elected with the powers of legislation and oversight, that is, the exercise of rights that already belong to it, conditional on terms. For this it is in fact using itself as a hostage against parliament. It may have remained too long under the influence of the story in which Stockholm syndrome occurs; could it be calculating that in this way the people, or for now the rest of parliament, will pity it, even feel sympathy for it?

No, what next?

Perhaps there may be a sympathy, a loyalty, a fellow-feeling that it feels toward those who hijacked it. Whatever it is, it is certain that the CHP has lost its mind. What the CHP is doing is not what a normal political party can do. We can foresee that it is not carrying out these actions, which will benefit neither itself nor its voters in the near or the far term, with its free will.

Without calling this a syndrome, though, we must try to understand it clearly. Let us not beat around the bush at all. Today the formation called Ergenekon is an organization with enough operational power to steer a party like the CHP, the most deep-rooted party of Turkish political life, as it wishes and to place its own priorities at the center of party politics. In doing so it is desperate enough to have skipped the stage of calculating what state the party will fall into, but effective enough in terms of operational power to be remarkable.

This power is now trying to open a bargain over the detention periods because of Ergenekon. From the moment we understand why it attaches so much importance to this, our democracy is bound to come to a fork in the road.