Turkish left’s most pressing problem: the Kurds
An intraparty conflict has become inevitable in Turkey’s center-left opposition as the amnesia-stricken Republican People's Party refuses to discuss the actual reasons behind its failure in the wake of another election defeat.
Every alliance has an objective. In Turkey’s presidential elections last week, the odd alliance between the Republican People’s Party (CHP), which describes itself as center-right, and the Nationalist Action Party (MHP), which represents Turkish nationalism, was aimed at stopping Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ascent to the country’s top post. The two opposition parties were defeated — again.
On Aug. 10, Erdogan became Turkey’s first popularly elected president. Acquiescing to their Sisyphean fate, the CHP and the MHP began again to roll the boulder up the hill, having watched it roll down in every election since 2002. By doing so, they are sealing their own bitter eternity, with the boulder doomed to roll back down again.
The CHP does not bother to even remember the years when the center-right aligned with the Kurds, spoke for change and democracy, swept Turkey from east to west and scored a major electoral victory. The party blamed its latest defeat not on its unprincipled, pragmatist alliance with the MHP but on shortcomings in its electoral campaign, and even saw some success in its failure.
The rightist wing within the CHP — which calls itself “ulusalci,” or neonationalist, and wields no major clout in the party — came up with tragicomic criticism: It blamed the party’s failure on straying from the “left lane.”
