2023-04-22 15:19:00
Who is Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the historic CHP Republican People’s Party and the six-party opposition coalition, who in three weeks will attempt to dethrone Turkey’s… lifelong “sultan” Tayyip Erdogan, after twenty consecutive years in power?
Even for Kemalist voters, Kilicdaroglu remains a compromise solution of necessity with few gifts, who would otherwise never have contested the leadership of the party, let alone the country.
But here is where life, and especially life after the failed coup of 2016, and of course the successive electoral defeats of the Kemalists brought it so that half of Turkey – presumably the most progressive and pro-democratic part of its neighbor – bet its change to this objectively mediocre politician, a Kemal from… the bottom shelf, whose only commonality with the founder of the party and modern Turkey, Atatürk, is his first name!
Bad lies – Kilicdaroglu is a colorless and odorless economist, who rose step by step in the hierarchy of public administration and at one point found himself head of the Social Insurance Organization (SSK), the Turkish “IKA”. In fact, his only real distinction was in 1994, when he was named “Bureaucrat of the Year” by a financial magazine!
But he also found himself at the helm of the Kemalists, as a confidant of the former leader Deniz Baikal and then as a “unifying” candidate in the “stone years” of the party. His only significant advantage is that he is considered “uncorrupted” and… unnaturally honest for a politician: no small thing of course for the deeply corrupt political life of Turkey. But it is equally certain that he does not inspire the voters, as in his political career he only counts defeats – starting in 2009, when he ran for mayor of Istanbul and lost handily to the candidate of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), and reaching the recent “duel” CHP-AKP in the parliamentary elections of 2020, where they “made a fool” of the “sultan” again.
Lately, as we got closer to the election, everyone – pollsters, officials of his party, officials of the other five cooperating opposition parties and countless citizens on social media – has been shouting at him that… he’s not up to the job, that the “sultan” will eat him cabbage: that is, they insist that he is not charismatic enough to deal with Erdogan and that he would do well to support either the current mayor of the city, Ekrem Imamoglu, or the mayor of Ankara, Mansur Yavas – two very popular Kemalist cadres.
But he there, clinging to his dream – to become, from a nameless “paperman”, a sultan instead of a sultan! Even when Meral Aksener angrily walked out of the six-party bargain, Kilicdaroglu persisted in his vision – and finally succeeded, under duress, in bringing “Lycaina” back into the “National Alliance” fold. They are united, you see, by the common goal of getting rid of Erdogan.
Now let’s get down to the nitty gritty – what are Kemal’s chances of dethroning Tayyip? In the first days after the devastating earthquake in Antalya, with inflation soaring and the exchange rate of the pound against the dollar and the Turkish economy as a whole in “Tartara”, all gallops showed that he had gained a strong lead and that only a broad government campaign of violence, fraud and vote-buying (which of course no one can rule out – several experts take it for granted…) could derail his momentum.
However, the opinion poll “scissor”, which at one point reached ten points, decreased dramatically after the first pre-election appearances – and promises, especially financial ones – of the “paliura” Tayip. In the latest survey by polling firm Metropoll, 42.6% of respondents are voting for Kilicdaroglu and 41.1% for Erdogan in the first round – the lead has evaporated.
Faced with this unexpectedly quick “rebound” of the Islamist president, Kilicdaroglu took a risk by opening up to the Kurds and the Left, namely the persecuted People’s Democratic Party, the HDP. Thus, a few days ago he openly accused Erdoğan of deliberately associating millions of Kurds with terrorism: “Every time the Palace sees that it will lose the elections, collective stigmatization of the Kurds begins,” said Kilicdaroglu, who also comes from the province. Dersim (Tunceli) in eastern Turkey, with a mixed population of Kurds and Alevis.
And yesterday he broke yet another “taboo”, publicly announcing that he is an Alevi, that is, a member of a historic and persecuted religious minority in Turkey, which for many conservative Sunni Muslims borders on sectarianism.
But the most important thing is that Kilicdaroglu convinced the HDP, the third largest political force in Turkey with over 10% of the vote, not to field its own candidate in the presidential elections, thus giving “tacit support” to him.
In return, he promised that if elected he would release HDP leader Selahattin Demirtas, who has been imprisoned since 2016, while he has repeatedly condemned the discrimination against the Kurdish language in Turkey, as well as the systematic “scaremongering” of dozens of HDP mayors in southeastern Turkey. And he may be Kemal in name only, but the CHP remains the faction of the original Kemal, the party that guarantees the secular character and pro-Western direction of the Turkish state – two building blocks that have been seriously challenged in Erdogan’s two decades in office .
Why we chose him
Because in three weeks he is facing history: either he will win, finally dethroning the “lifelong” Erdogan, or he will be defeated, sealing the perpetuation of our neighboring neo-Ottoman… sultanate!
#bureaucrat #sultan