The moves -- or rather attempts -- to reformulate a position on all the bleeding issues of the country shows that even the party itself, by sending messages, acknowledges that it is mainly about the process of change rather than a simple fight to “grab power” to which it feels forced to adopt to.
In the span of a week, frontline CHP figures talked about the Kurdish issue, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the headscarf and a new constitution. They all sent some vague signals of the level of the internal search and its direction.
Apart from the messages conveyed through the campaign on the referendum, perhaps the most detailed and revealing “data” aimed at the foreign audience was made available in the interview Der Spiegel did with Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the party’s new leader.
In the talk, a rather undecided, superficial and “rhetorically shy” politician emerges.
“We are a modern country; our laws and ethical principles are Western. The government is in the process of gambling away this tradition. They are scaring away our partners. They are beginning to exert their power over the state, step by step,” says Kılıçdaroğlu.
To the Western ears I doubt this might sound rather awkward. Exerting a political will over the state is any elected political party or coalition’s normal, democratic behavior. Kılıçdaroğlu obviously has a difficulty, like his predecessor, distancing himself from arguments based on fear.
For years, the large segments of the liberal or leftist intellectual elite reached a common conclusion that it was the “state” (a combination of civilian and military bureaucracy and the top level judiciary) that kept governments under its siege and not vice versa. Therefore, this might prove to be a hard choice for Kılıçdaroğlu to persuade his European partners, most of whom despite a certain amount of mistrust on this or that issue, generally stand behind what the Justice and Development Party (AKP) does in terms of reform and economic liberalization.
Probably knowing that weighing too much on fear would not be strongly persuading, Kılıçdaroğlu later contradicts himself by reassuring that “he [Recep Tayyip Erdoğan] won’t be successful; the foundations of our country have been in place since 1923.”
Another remarkable point has to do with a factual error (deliberate, if not a mistranslation), on the affiliation of President Abdullah Gül.
Commenting on the constitutional reform package, Kılıçdaroğlu says, “The government would like to see 14 of 17 justices on the constitutional court be named directly by the president, who at the moment is a member of the AKP.” If the latter is true, we would have a story. The president of the republic has to leave all party ties and the like as he enters office. I called the Presidency, and was told it was not true.
Another issue on which Kılıçdaroğlu sounds like his predecessor, Deniz Baykal, is where he stands on civilian control of the military. His response that “one wonders how much influence the army is supposed to retain,” demands explanation, and I wish my colleague had pressured him over that because Kılıçdaroğlu insisted in a follow-up question that “the military plays a watchdog role everywhere in the world.” What does he mean by “watchdog”? We are left wondering.
Then come even more problematic parts, when the talks enter the issue of Kurds and minority rights.
Here are excerpts of what Kılıçdaroğlu says:
“Everyone should be accepted as a citizen of Turkey regardless of his or her background. I think it is wrong to practice politics on the basis of ethnic or religious identity. Such a course has resulted in much bloodshed in our history.”
These words would be seen as falling much too short on social democratic values since Kılıçdaroğlu is apparently inclined to disregard ethnic and religious rights as elementary factors to resolve problems. It is, in other words, a continuity of policies of denial, marking the traditional CHP path.
This was exactly the case when Sencer Ayata, a leading member of the party and a sociologist, declared that the headscarf issue can be solved through a compromise.
“The majority of females in the towns and villages of Turkey still adopt a traditional way of covering their head, but the hijab-style headscarves are a different style. This style of headscarves has spread in cities, with a largely young and educated following. While the majority of those who ‘follow the trend’ do not emphasize a political identity, those who do emphasize politics are mostly university students… A middle ground can be reached if a solution is sought. An agreement on different headscarf styles could even be reached.” This is an old CHP song with new lyrics. It says: Let us agree on instructing our girls, students, to wear the headscarf like their grandmothers and show a little hair and the problem will go away. If the CHP still sees the society as engineerable like in the 1930s, then there is reason to forget a consensus on any issue for a long time to come.
