If I had to grade him, I would give him seven out of 10. He made a mistake by raising the bar too high during the campaign, suggesting that 30 percent was a realistic target. It was not but apparently the CHP lacks the kind of professional polling expertise the Justice and Development Party (AKP) had in abundance. On the other hand, increasing the party’s votes by 3.5 million compared to 2007 is not that bad.
He made another mistake by giving in to the old guard in the party, putting Ergenekon suspects and center-right politicians on the list of candidates. By doing so, he confused many potential voters who concluded that there was a yawning gap between these new CHP politicians and the new policies on the Constitution, the Kurdish problem and the military that Kılıçdaroğlu presented at his rallies. Still, he did manage to create the perception that things were changing inside the CHP. That is no small matter after many years of stagnation under former leader Deniz Baykal.
All in all, I think no one could have done better and Kılıçdaroğlu should now get the chance to prove that he is able and willing to stand up for his new ideas in preparing a new constitution and in finding a lasting solution to the Kurdish problem together with the AKP and the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP).
It did not come as a real surprise that some of the CHP old-style hard-liners were not happy with the new leader and his electoral performance and did not hesitate to start the destruction work immediately after the votes were counted. I probably miss the necessary doses of cynicism and cunning but I had not imagined that the leader of the counterrevolution would be Baykal. I could not believe my eyes when I read his comments on the CHP results, scolding his successor for increasing the party’s share of the votes to 26 percent. How shameless can you be?
In all the elections that he lost, and there were many, Baykal never managed to win more than 21 percent of the vote. That was in 2007. In the three previous elections, he did not even get to 20 percent (2002), did not get enough votes to get into Parliament (8.7 percent in 1999) and barely jumped over the 10 percent threshold in 1995. So we are witnessing the most experienced loser of elections in Turkish history blaming the man who took over the bankrupt assets one year ago, for not improving the results with 50 percent but “only” with 25 percent.
I know self harm it is an old tradition in the CHP but you would at least expect the one person who knows from his own experience how self-defeating this intra-party bickering is to shut up and let Kılıçdaroğlu finish what he started. Unless, of course, you are not interested in the future success of the party but want to keep it as an instrument to defend the interests of those people in Turkey who have been misinterpreting developments in this country for decades.
Most analysts agree that, in the end, the Baykal-led rebellion will not succeed. But it will take Kılıçdaroğlu and his team a lot of time and energy to prevent the return of the political zombies. I sincerely wish he could spend that same amount on solving Turkey’s problems.
One remark on the decision by the prime minister to withdraw all accusations of libel and slander that he had filed against several politicians and journalists in the last couple of months: I have said on many occasions that the AKP leader should not have started these lawsuits in the first place. I now welcome the fact that he has woken up to the fact that these court cases only had one effect: to confirm the perception in Turkey and abroad that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has become an authoritarian leader who does not accept any criticism.
Blaming The Economist and other papers for printing these uncomfortable observations was not the best way of responding. Stopping the pending cases and, hopefully, in the future refraining from opening new ones is.
