Will the CHP be able to catch the Spirit of the Age?

The congress-holding party, the CHP, has concluded its latest congress with the election of its new party assembly members. Although it is often criticized for convening congresses so frequently, in my view this is one of the CHP's most positive traits. I see nothing to criticize in its running democracy within itself and trying to settle its problems by confronting and debating them at congresses.

Perhaps what should be questioned or assessed is why, despite so many congresses, no mind emerges from within the CHP that can truly detect or grasp the "Spirit of the Age." Congresses are fine, but why do these congresses not carry the CHP toward a structure that could become an alternative to the government? In a sense, congresses are an indicator of how intra-party democracy functions. Yet what comes out of this functioning is results geared toward the struggle for power within the party, rather than the development of the party's discourse and policies into something that could be an alternative to the government. In the end, the party cannot develop a discourse that could be an alternative to the government, but each time it soothes the problem of intra-party democracy by redistributing roles within the party.

Truly, after Baykal, the CHP's search in its discourse and practices should in no way be underestimated. Despite the zigzags he has drawn in terms of discursive consistency, Kılıçdaroğlu's holding back from the classic obsessive emphasis on secularist discourse, as well as his approach to the Kurdish question, have been giant steps for the CHP, even if small ones for Turkey. In fact, with the initiative he has shown in this direction, we can comfortably say that Kılıçdaroğlu has begun to draw a considerable leadership profile. In the poll announced by SDE last week, it can even be observed that Kılıçdaroğlu received a relatively positive response for these approaches.

However, despite all of Kılıçdaroğlu's political entrepreneurship, the CHP has problems that it cannot get on top of. Frankly, even if the CHP tries to get on the right path, there is a problem of historical belatedness on that path. Whether in the steps it takes in the field of democratization or in governance, in the policies it sets, it cannot show anything more advanced than what the governing party is still implementing.

In his congress speech, while telling his friends that the spirit of the age must be read well, Kılıçdaroğlu took the subject all the way back to the hunter-gatherer era. Describing the transition from the agricultural society, which he took as the world's first great wave of transformation, to the industrial society, he claimed that today the world is making the transition to the information society, but that the government is not fulfilling what this requires. Yet as the new CHP, he promised all the regulations and investments that the information society requires.

Frankly, under this heading, both the criticisms he directed at the government lagged far behind the spirit of the age, and the things he proposed showed that he does not even adequately follow what is already being done within national education or higher education. Moreover, his analysis is extremely superficial. The sectoral development that progressed from agriculture to industry has given way not so much to information as to the "services" sector, and this sector has brought forward information and education as its most important raw material.

As far as I can see, the AK Parti's and Prime Minister Erdoğan's recent speeches and approaches on employment are made precisely within this vision. While the YÖK of the period supported by the CHP faced 1,700,000 students demanding higher education every year, it persistently refrained from increasing quotas or founding new universities, and in return it went down the path of excluding and blocking students who wanted to study, under pretexts such as the headscarf or the coefficient.

Yet the "information society" that Kılıçdaroğlu speaks of was something that could be possible above all through increasing the number of universities and spreading higher education as widely as possible. Not a single state university was opened from 1993 to 2003, that is, during the period of the February 28 practices that advanced with the CHP's support, and we have all seen together with what reasoning they were not opened. Yet with those that began to be opened again from 2003 onward, the number of universities today has reached 170, and we have arrived at a period in which almost no one who wants to study is left unable to, and therefore no one's brain is found surplus and wasted.

Doing justice to the information society is above all a matter that can be tested by this difference in approach. The AK Parti government has already been doing for ten years more than what the CHP promises to do in the future. The only right way for the CHP to prove itself in this matter would be, should it take over the government, to put distance between itself and the education policies it defended ten years ago, which settled on society like a nightmare, and to convince people that there will never be a return to those policies.

The CHP's historical belatedness, or the stain of its historical baggage, is a great disadvantage. Grasping the spirit of the age is important, but not being heedless of that spirit is also important. In preparing for the information society, one should not busy oneself with opposing the 4+4+4 system on purely ideological grounds, but should approach and criticize it in its truly most functional dimensions. Is there nothing to criticize in this system? Of course there is a great deal. But if you reduce the matter merely to the level of the İHLs that will be opened or religion classes, it will not even be possible for the CHP to feel the spirit of the age.

The field of education, like the field of the economy, and even the field of democracy, are areas in which the CHP shows belatedness. It needs to work harder to close the gap. Otherwise it will continue to fall into situations like this more often: The year is 2007. Before the July 22 elections, Baykal is answering journalists' questions on a TV program. While saying what they would do in the field of health, he takes out his identity card from his pocket, shows it, and says, "under our government, everyone who shows their identity card will be able to receive treatment in state hospitals without having to show any other document." Of course, these words would be met with the journalists' strange looks. Because this practice, and even more than that, had already been in place for quite some time.

Capturing the spirit of the age is in fact very important both for parties and for the country. When the CHP and other parties fail to capture the spirit of the age, political development in Turkey ceases to be a subject of contention among parties and becomes a subject of the governing party's own internal searching or development. That is why Numan Kurtulmuş's joining the AK Parti, or what the AK Parti will do, continues to be more important than the CHP's opposition.