Mosaics Of An İmpending Revolution

Türkiye is in a time of desperation; the ruling coalition’s promise of better times is only believed by the hopeful faithful. Apart from them, most people expect a continuation of economic and political uncertainties. It is not the socially well-established institutions but influential organisations and their leaders with an unmistakable visible closeness to the government that dominate the public sphere. There is little evidence of an agile civil society and an enlightened public. Uncertainty and pessimism are coupled with hopelessness when it comes to prospects; hardly any young people prefer a life in Türkiye to a life abroad. Rarely does a woman want to live in Türkiye if she wants to lead a self-determined life. Everyone has become accustomed to high inflation, corruption and unemployment rates, and most academics, journalists, artists and intellectuals have become accustomed to external and/or internal self-discipline and censorship.

But how is it that in this country, despite these crises, the government seems to be risk-free in its office? The short and most frequently given answer to this question is forbearance; the forbearance of the citizens and the forbearance of the opposition, as well as the forbearance of those in power but dissatisfied. If we look at the election results alone, there seems to be no better candidate than Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AK Party) in the eyes of the citizens. The Turkish people are used to strong leaders; the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire was an absolute monarch. The founder of Türkiye, Gazi Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was untouchable in his office. Most of his successors, such as İsmet İnönü, Adnan Menderes, Bülent Ecevit, Süleyman Demirel and Turgut Özal were dominant in the party leadership and in the government. Their leadership style was hardly characterised by a democratic attitude. This leadership style was adapted to the conditions of a democracy in the age of the media and digitalisation by current President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan with religious and charismatic elements of leadership.

From this historical point of view, the current President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is not the architect, but the beneficiary of these uncertain times, and the opposition is the docile sufferer of these times; since the Gezi Park riots of 28 May 2013, the government has begun to direct the pledge to justice and development in the direction of state security and abiding by the law. Law and order became the principle of all political actions. In this process, according to the opposition leaders, the coup attempt of 15 July 2016 was used by the government as an opportunity to undermine the institutions of democracy, the rule of law and freedom of press and assembly. The nationalisation of the property of people with a (suspected) relationship to the coup plotters, the imprisonment of several journalists, generals, academics, entrepreneurs, artists and politicians has not only damaged democracy, the rule of law, the economy and the country’s international relations, but has also helped the government forces to maintain their power.

The fact that hardly any jobs in state institutions are awarded according to the principles of meritocracy, ability, knowledge and skill also disturbs the circles of the AK Party, which still cherish the hope of justice and development together. However, the already highly centralised state was monopolised in the office of the president following the establishment of the presidential system. At the end of the day, even the ruling malcontents seem to have turned parliament into a debating club, the courts into an extension of the government’s organisation for disciplining the opposition, the press into a propaganda organ for one political direction, art into a medium for the self-expression of certain actors and science into an organisation for preparing the next generation of office-holders for the next period of the same actors. In fact, not only is there a lack of discourse on the liberal conditions of participatory will formation and decision-making, but their absence is also perceived by all democratically minded forces.

One paradox of this misery seems to lie in the fact that while the government, and above all the president, is capitalising on this, the opposition is becoming weaker and more fragmented. The downfall of Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu is a good example of this paradox. Kılıçdaroğlu was the leader of the main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP). After the last parliamentary and municipal elections on 31 March 2024, and the subsequent presidential elections of the first round on 14 May 2024 and the second round on 28 May 2024, the then leader of the Republican People’s Party and the candidate of the opposition bloc Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu was held responsible for the defeat of the opposition. Anyone who cannot win in these times of crisis against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has been in office for 20 years and is exhausted of office, must go – this was the dominant opinion.

Who is Kılıçdaroğlu

Kılıçdaroğlu was born in Tunceli. Tunceli is the only place in Türkiye where the Anatolian Alevis are in the majority. And Kılıçdaroğlu’s family is one of the Alevi elite. As a devout Alevi, he follows the teachings of Hacı Bektas Veli and as party chairman of the CHP, he takes Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as his role model. Hacı Bektas Veli is known for his attempts to establish a peaceful life on earth. His teaching is based on restraint in judgement and the attempt to unite God-nature-man in practice.

In this picture, Hacı Bektas Veli reconciles the hunter with the hunted, the tiger with a gazelle. According to this image of man, religion as a way of knowing about good and God is the method of self-control under polar world conditions; un-knowledge, un-righteousness, un-justice, un-freedom, un-justice, un-beauty, un-good. Atatürk tried to follow this ideal by founding a republic of citizens with equal rights and duties from the decline of the Ottoman monarchy. And Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu tried to practise this view of man and the world by bringing the opposition forces into an alliance against the government based on common ideas and interests. As a politician, Kılıçdaroğlu follows the founder of the Republic, Gazi Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. And Atatürk, as the founder of the Republic and of Kılıçdaroğlu’s party, symbolises for the Turkish population the establishment of peace achieved according to republican standards and under difficult wartime conditions. Like hardly any other politician before him, Atatürk wanted to separate politics from religion. This project has been pursued by the CHP since its foundation under the concept of laicism. In a nutshell, laicism is what Hacı Bektas Veli, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu had in common.

On the other hand, the incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is a politician who is only satisfied with Hacı Bektas Veli’s and Atatürk’s view of the world and humanity under certain conditions. In the best-case scenario, he would give both actors a Sunni underpinning before even engaging with their ideas. Erdoğan is not only politically opposed to Kılıçdaroğlu in terms of his view of mankind and the world, but also in terms of his personality traits. While Erdoğan made his political capital especially since the gezi riots from conflicts, Kılıçdaroğlu favours consensus. While Erdoğan had a cautious relationship with the state before his summit in his political career, Kılıçdaroğlu was a bureaucrat – a man of state.

Both Kılıçdaroğlu and Erdoğan come from poor families with a strong connection to religion. However, while Erdoğan is the prototype of a charismatic leader in the sense of Max Weber, Kılıçdaroğlu symbolises the boring bureaucrat with a penchant for a puritanical lifestyle. While Erdoğan looks back on a career from imam, footballer and mayor, party chairman, prime minister president and finally president of the country, Kılıçdaroğlu worked as an auditor in state institutions. His last position was as Director General of the state social insurance institution, the pension fund. He only entered politics after his retirement at the beginning of the 2000s. What both politicians have in common is patience, stamina and perseverance. Erdoğan tolerated the military, the Kurds, the feminists and the intellectuals for years. Kılıçdaroğlu, on the other hand, practically had to run literally several marathons under extraordinary circumstances before he was accepted to some extent as a leader in his own party.

Transformations

After a deputy of Kılıçdaroğlu’s party was arrested, Kılıçdaroğlu started a protest march of 421 kilometres from Ankara to Istanbul. This march under the name of Justice is also unique in terms of world history; it is the longest march in the 21st century led by the main opposition party of a country since Mao Zedong in China. One of Kılıçdaroğlu’s successes was that he began to form a cross-party front against the ruling AK Party very early on. The legacy of his predecessor Deniz Baykal was gradually pushed into the party’s folkloristic background without an exploding power struggle. This was also accompanied by a transformation in the political orientation of the party; from a party mainly characterised by strict secularism, Turkishness, statism and personality cults to a social democratic party with a European profile. Under Kılıçdaroğlu leadership, the party actively sought alliances with Kurds, the left, the right and the religious.

Kılıçdaroğlu himself also underwent a transformation during this process, going from a bureaucrat with the appropriate bland language and political practice to a political strategist, from a naive Uncle Kemal to a belligerent opposition leader. A good illustration of this statement is the experience with his inner-party opponent Muharrem İnce. İnce ran for the party leadership against Kılıçdaroğlu, but did not receive the necessary number of signatures from party members at the party’s general convention. As a sign of leniency for the party’s internal opposition, Kılıçdaroğlu collected the signatures for his opponent Muharrem İnce, according to his own statements. In his speech to the party, İnce took advantage of the moment and criticised the party leadership under Kılıçdaroğlu with a naive political stance against the ruling party. Implicitly, İnce said that because Kılıçdaroğlu is of Kurdish and Alevi descent, the two anti-identities of Turkish-Sunni policy-making, he cannot stand up to the government for his own fear of being publicly defamed for his affiliation. İnce promised a tougher course. However, despite promising appearances, İnce lost the leadership contest to Kılıçdaroğlu but won the hearts of many voters in Türkiye. This led to Kılıçdaroğlu renouncing his candidature against Erdoğan in the presidential elections. Kılıçdaroğlu himself proposed Ince as the CHP’s presidential candidate against Erdoğan.  Ince lost the elections against Erdoğan and thus also Kılıçdaroğlu.

Municipal elections as a critical moment 

After losing the election, İnce laid claim to the party leadership, claiming that he had lost the elections because the party was not aligned with his political style. He demanded the resignation of Kılıçdaroğlu. ince did this by, among other tactics, thanking Kılıçdaroğlu for his commitment to the party and promising Kılıçdaroğlu the honorary party chairmanship, which Kılıçdaroğlu labelled as political indecency. It was precisely under these rather critical times that Kılıçdaroğlu consolidated his long-held policy of reorientation; he let İnce run dry and focused on the upcoming municipal elections in March 2019. In Ankara and İzmir, he relied on the proven candidates, but in İstanbul, Kılıçdaroğlu had a new face in the national political arena; Ekrem İmamoğlu.

The dramatic nature of this selection is due to the fact that İstanbul is not only the largest, most economically powerful city in Türkiye, but is also the stronghold of the ruling AK Party and the political home of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Erdoğan started his political career on a grand scale as mayor of İstanbul. Running for mayor of İstanbul meant competing not only with the AK Party candidate, but with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan himself. How was a young politician who was barely known in politics supposed to win against the AK Party and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan? The drama was exacerbated by the fact that the then and last Prime Minister of Türkiye was the candidate of the AK Party, Mr Binali Yıldırım. And the last straw came when an academic from Tunceli handed a letter from the arrested Abdullah Öcalan to the media in the hope that the Kurdish voters in İstanbul would vote for Binali Yıldırım. Nothing worked out for the AK Party and Erdoğan. But Kılıçdaroğlu was the real winner in every respect. His party won the municipal elections in İstanbul and other metropolises and he secured his seat in the party leadership.

In fact, Kılıçdaroğlu proved to be a sophisticated strategist with fine early perception signals during this phase. He first demonstrated this ability in the transfer of MPs – shortly before the national elections in April 2018, exactly 15 MPs switched from the CHP to İyi Party so that the latter was allowed to participate in the elections at all. This move led directly to voter losses for the nationalist MHP, which is the coalition partner of the ruling AK Party.

The alliance formed before the last national elections under the name National Bloc, which consisted of CHP, Gelecek Parti (Future Party) of then Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, DEVA Party under the chairmanship of former Foreign and Economy Minister Ali Babacan and Saadet Party under the leadership of Temel Kahramanoğlu, Democracy Party under the chairmanship of Gültekin Uysal and the İyi Party of then Meral Akşener, emerged indirectly from this alliance. Officially, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) was the party particularly supported by Kurds, not included in this National Bloc, but in practice everyone knows that the then HDP, now the Dem Party, supports a possible impeachment of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan with all its might. The leader of the HDP, Selahattin Demirtas, who has been imprisoned since 4 November 2016, used to say, “We will not make you (Recep Tayyip Erdoğan) president”. In any case, this alliance enabled Kılıçdaroğlu to realign his party politically; CHP now stood not only for secularism, Turkishness, elitism and statism, but also for a democratic rule of law.

This transformation was carried out by Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu under massive political pressure. After the attempted military coup in July 2016, a state of emergency was declared in the country; any opposition was hushed up. There was not only an extreme centralisation of politics and political intervention in the economy, but also a monopoly in the media in favour of the ruling AK Party. Under these conditions, politics was transformed into a mixture of conspiracy theories, insignificance and uncertainty in action coupled with an intense search for a messiah. After the last lost elections, this amalgam initially led to Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu being voted out as party leader in favour of Özgül Özel, who was supported by Ekrem Imamoğlu, the mayor of İstanbul. Both Özel and İmamoğlu are ‘apprentices’ of Kılıçdaroğlu.

But the public recognised İmamoğlu as having the necessary charisma and people saw in Özel the lightness of being; İmamoğlu is able to reach out to the people, to use their language to appeal to their values and goals and to encourage political activism. And Özgül Özel’s age, religion, nationality, experiences and expectations make him an average Turkish citizen; it is difficult for the ruling party to find in him the representative of the Other – as they did with Kılıçdaroğlu.

Kitchen politics

It is precisely this amalgam of heightened ambivalence that enable Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu to undergo a new transformation; from the compulsive consensus-seeking party leader to a charismatic grassroots activist. He started this transformation on Wednesday 9 February 2022 as the then CHP party leader by tweeting that he would not pay electricity bills until Recep Tayyip Erdoğan reversed the latest price hikes. In view of the fact that Türkiye was going through the worst social, economic and political crisis then as it is now, and Turks consequently pricked up their ears when the country was plunged into a state of emergency in Kazakhstan as a result of the price hikes of LPG, Kılıçdaroğlu unsettled the minds of the country to the highest degree at the very time with the attitude of a reformer. Was Kılıçdaroğlu sending out a political invitation to the people to take action?

During this time, Kılıçdaroğlu began to address everyone in a series of videos. These videos were broadcast directly from his humble kitchen. Not only did they stand in stark contrast to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s interviews in extravagantly large rooms in terms of their format, but also increasingly in their tendency towards silent revolution; in them, Kılıçdaroğlu speaks in everyday language as a concerned citizen, as one of them. He is guided by the question; what should I do in this situation and under these conditions? The subject of these video addresses was not the big projects, but the problems that need to be overcome daily. In them, Kılıçdaroğlu shows that he understands the problems, worries, wishes and fears of ordinary people. He tells them that he himself is plagued by this everyday life; as a father, as a husband, as a citizen, etc.

Was he speaking to the subconscious of the people with these videos? The October Revolution in Russia, the independence movement led by Mohandas Gandhi, the Arab Spring – all these political movements spring from events that were hardly considered significant at the time they happened. In any case, it was clear to all those involved that a transformation could emerge from any refusal, from any symbolic act. The central question was whether Kılıçdaroğlu’s experiences from the Justice March, for example, were enough to form an agile but calm transformation. Does Kılıçdaroğlu have these leadership qualities?

Today, these questions seem more urgent than ever. Likely, Kılıçdaroğlu is once again on the verge of a silent transformation; as the opposition’s presidential candidate, he was supported by a broad range of interests and ideas, including those of civil society. Although his Alevi affiliation was in opposition to dominant orthodox Sunni-Turkish values, although the issues were dominated by a highly centralised media with an organic relationship to the government, although state power was programmed against Kılıçdaroğlu, although any political movement was monitored and massaged by the government, Kılıçdaroğlu almost managed to lead the hegemony of a president considered autocratic to agonistic pluralism. In any case, the path to demos was taken precisely during this period.

This path to demos and thus to unpredictable political action is coming to the fore today in a new form; the post to Uğur Dündar in X and the reaction against Fatih Altaylı also in X; Dündar and Altaylı are two well-established journalists with a penchant for sensationalism. In his reaction against these two journalists, Kılıçdaroğlu becomes personal and even vulgarly insulting like few others have done. Kılıçdaroğlu accuses Dündar of conformism under all circumstances. Using concrete examples and comparisons with other actors of the time, Kılıçdaroğlu puts the journalist Dündar in the corner of apolitical people in a political arena without being clear about himself, the times and the circumstances. “Donkeys can do something, but you can’t,” Kılıçdaroğlu begins in his defence against Fatih Altaylı. After Kılıçdaroğlu lists several Altaylı’s misdemeanours, he describes Altaylı as shameful, venal, misogynistic, ruthless, addicted, a collaborator, a coward, a tyrant and a contract killer.  Finally, Kılıçdaroğlu warns him: ‘Beni daha fazla konuşturma!’ (Don’t make me say more).

Possibly never before has a reaction from Kılıçdaroğlu been received with so much public interest. Both letters were published in X. Both reactions are written in the language of an everyday person. Both letters were unexpected. In both cases, Kılıçdaroğlu does not mince his words – a very atypical case for him. The whole thing is also happening at a time of transformation for his party; the new chairman of the Republican People’s Party Özgün Özel visited President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in his office, which Kılıçdaroğlu avoided like the plague. Özel seems to want to strengthen his position as party chairman against rivals (such as Mansur Yavaş, mayor of Ankara, and Ekrem İmamoğlu, the mayor of Istanbul) from his own party by paradoxically seeking proximity to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Kılıçdaroğlu, as leader of the party, was close to the people in his politics, but not in his personality. In contrast, neither Erdoğan, Özel, Mansur Yavaş nor Ekrem İmamoğlu have any reservations about being close to the people. Apart from Kılıçdaroğlu, all the other personalities mentioned can speak the vernacular without any major hurdles. Except for Kılıçdaroğlu, they all have populist traits. Apart from Kılıçdaroğlu, they are all guided by a cult of personality. In this respect, all of them, except Kılıçdaroğlu, can engage in a confrontation; Özgün Özel’s search for proximity to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will help Erdoğan to keep possible opposition, for example against the country’s economic misery, at bay. This closeness will also help Özel, because it will ease the tension between the founding party of the Republic of Türkiye and the current state under the leadership of Erdoğan. The communication has also been worked up in the media, which Özel to stabilise his own position as the new party leader. Mansur Yavaş and Ekrem İmamoğlu could also capitalise on this politically by framing this policy of closeness as Özel’s concession to the government.

The answer to the question of what Kılıçdaroğlu will do about this communication, on the other hand, remains unclear at present, although he alone is not only in communication from left to right, from secular to religious, from nationalist to social democratic circles, but has not retreated from this communication under enormous pressure. We will see whether this already established communication will help him to complete a new transformation from good politician to responsible national hero.