Still, I think Mumcu and Ağar, the leaders of ANAVATAN and the DYP, respectively, did the right thing in terms of their personal political benefits because there was no option left other than uniting under a third roof for Ağar and Mumcu, who, by boycotting Parliament during the first round of the presidential elections, betrayed the democratic duty of representation devolved on them by the people, and thus committed political suicide. If this political merger will ever be recorded by history as a unity in the right, it will be recorded as the merger of two helpless parties.The innovative and reformist mission assumed in the 1980s by the late Turgut Özal’s legendary party ANAP had already been revived and was being perpetuated by another party (AK Party). ANAP, therefore, had become the wrong address for those in search of Özal’s mission.
When Mumcu assumed the presidency of ANAP, which had lost its mission and distanced itself from the spirit of Özal’s time, he fell into the fallacy that he would be able to revive the party by changing the logo from ANAP to ANAVATAN and the color from yellow to green. In fact, he opened far greater gaps between the Özal spirit and the party by undergoing more radical changes. Being at the rudder of that once-civil and democrat party of Özal’s, he swerved from people to the state as if the people were in need of another CHP.
People, on the other hand, were already aware that an ANAP far from the Özal spirit could never be a real ANAP, and accordingly demonstrated this awareness in the last couple of elections. Mumcu’s greatest fallacy was to turn a deaf ear to this crystal-clear message.
And for the record, even those thinking that Özal’s mission had now become manifest in AK Party did not cease to shower their sympathies and fondness on Mumcu, who they thought was a civil and democratic politician in Özal’s lineage. And they commented on his joining AK Party as a natural result of this mission. Even, in an article I wrote before the Nov. 3, 2002 elections, I attributed Mumcu’s civil, democratic and reformist stance to the Özal spirit and even wrote that “Wherever Erkan Mumcu goes is the Özal mission.”
His stance in those days led me to write that; and his current stance today is leading me to write this column.
At the point we have arrived at, Mumcu, who boycotted Parliament in the presidential elections, not only betrayed the Özal mission, but also committed political suicide. Today, even closing ANAVATAN and merging with DYP under the roof of the Democrat Party (DP) cannot save him from falling. It will not be an exaggerated attitude to see Mumcu as politically dead. Even if he is not, he will need a very long time to recuperate.
Just like the Motherland Party, which, as a two-month-old party in 1983, put an end to the repressive interim regime of the military coup of 1980, the Democrat Party, which waged a war against the despotic single-party mindset of the CHP and ended this period in 1950 by proclaiming, “Enough is enough; let the people speak!” also has a very respected place in Turkish politics. However, neither the successors of Özal in ANAP nor the leaders of the DP tradition after Adnan Menderes proved worthy of these venerable political legacies.
The DYP has kept saying so far that it is the continuation of the political tradition of the DP and has tried to benefit from this statement. At this point, the current officials of ANAVATAN and the DYP have so badly loused up the mission they assumed that they saw the only way out as going back to the beginning, a merger under the DP roof. Whereas the place under whose roof they united is now only a name, the political spirit and mission of DP are somewhere else. It is obvious that by going back to the DP’s legendary name, the DYP will still not be able to eradicate the unrest it sparked in public opinion by listening to the elitist bureaucracy instead of the people in the presidential election. Is it not explanatory enough that people have already associated the motto “Let the State Speak!” with the new DP?
My guess is that the DYP and ANAVATAN would not be able to surpass the 10 percent election barrier separately, and now they will further deepen their “deep” failure by uniting under the DP roof. Ağar and Mumcu know very well that one plus one doesn’t always make two in politics. What will happen is that the DP’s great legacy will have been tarnished. Ağar and Mumcu will be remembered in the future as having spoilt even that legacy.
These days, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the Democratic Left Party (DSP) are in search of ways for a merger in the left by modeling on the recent merger in the right. As someone who has been closely following the leftist wing in Turkey (by the way, leftist is a name they don’t deserve considering their contradictory behavior to the universal meaning of this term), I can say that if there will ever be a merger in the left, that will be a merger to be realized only to be divided. Looking at the last 15 years of this political tradition, which claims to be leftist although it has been deliberately separate from the people, would be enough to see that this will be just another link in the chain of history of mergers and divisions in the left.
Well, what can I say; I wish you more mergers and divisions...
