The Barren Centrism of the “Pre–March 19” CHP

The Republican People’s Party (CHP), the anti-communist and Turkish-nationalist party at the foundation of the republic, was pushed to the center left in the mid-1960s by a growing body of social movements — students, Kurds, and increasingly peasants and workers. At the height of revolutionary fervor and a growing fascist countermobilization, the party appeared to shift further to the left by the end of the 1970s. But in 1980 a coup with a right-wing reinterpretation of the republic’s founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s principles decimated the Left and initiated neoliberal change.

The CHP was banned under the military-technocratic order established in 1980. Its offshoot the Social Democratic Populist Party (SHP) shifted back to the center left, starting to neoliberalize under the influence of not only the coup but also its counterparts in Europe’s social democratic and socialist parties. Nevertheless, it still coalesced with the Kurds until the beginning of the 1990s, campaigning favorably for their cause, winning ample Kurdish support, and featuring leaders of the Kurdish movement as parliamentarians. Yet the intensifying war in Kurdistan led to a backlash from the military and bureaucratic establishment, which the party was unable to handle. Indeed, this establishment had remained core to the CHP-SHP’s organizational and ideological structure even during its left-wing turn from the 1960s to the early 1990s. The SHP collapsed and was reborn under a reactionary leadership. Reopening under its original name, CHP, in 1992, the party shifted further to the right, definitively losing most Kurds.

Broader public debate witnessed endless spats between warring Kemalist and more conservative and nationalist factions of the party, which still blame one another for losses to, or insufficient success against, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) in recent years. Among these, the current, relatively more conservative faction of the CHP around Ekrem İmamoğlu seemed to have the moral high ground, due to his election as mayor of Istanbul, openness to Kurds, and growing popularity among Turks. However, these three factions were not so different in their main tendency: to stay away from the streets and stick to a narrowly institutional politics.

The CHP long banked on the AKP’s incompetence and harsh authoritarianism, hoping that Erdoğan’s ruling party would wreck the country so badly that the people would have no choice but to vote the old establishment back in. This negative strategy failed again and again. In the last several years, the party has added to this a slim positive strategy: municipal effectiveness. The party already held many municipalities, but these were poorly governed. The 2019 municipal victory changed the thinking of the CHP, and the party ratcheted up its municipal provision programs, gaining broad sympathy across all classes. However, this was the kind of neoliberal welfarism that the AKP used to be good at. The main opposition did not intend to change the disastrous macroeconomic path the country embarked on after the 1980 coup. Like the AKP in its alleged golden era (i.e., its relatively more center-rightist first decade), the CHP sought only to mitigate the destruction.

The CHP’s insistence on nonaction seemed to be working. Jaded by the Gezi uprising’s failure to remove Erdoğan, most people were already open to the message “Sit and wait for the elections.” But this was shortsighted. Erdoğan had been laying the groundwork for an assault on İmamoğlu for a long time. The arrest came on March 19. Even then the CHP would not budge. It was students who took to the streets and forced the party to act too.

Students Broke the Spell

Why are the students so angry? The economy is in shambles, and they don’t have a secure future. College offered them respite for a few years by at least buying them some time before they hit an unwelcoming job market and also creating opportunities for reflection on how to survive in a quickly impoverishing country. Erdoğan’s moves in the last several years poisoned this experience. The AKP has a longer-term project of cultivating its alternative elite through the university system. Comparatively speaking, the Turkish right still takes education and intellectualism much more seriously than its American counterpart. So the ruling party’s preferred strategy was a gradual replacement of liberals and leftists on campuses through raising a new generation of AKP-leaning students. However, over the years, the business and political opportunities created by the party have been much more appealing to its cadres, who have mostly turned away from serious academic and other cultural work. In the mid-2010s, the party shifted to a more coercive approach.

A pro-Kurdish politicization of academics also incited this turn, but Erdoğan’s aims were bigger. Along with purging universities of hundreds of academics who signed a peace petition, he also started a top-down transformation, whereby his appointees (the infamous kayyumlar) would start to rule universities with an iron fist and staff them with unqualified academic personnel. Unable to realize its dream of “cultural hegemony” on campuses, the party replaced consent with force, eroding higher education itself in this process.

The frustrations with appointee-ruled colleges, along with increasing politicization on campuses, led students to ignore the CHP’s insistence on quietism. Students (primarily from Istanbul University) heroically cut through police barricades on March 19, the very day of the arrest, and marched to the mayoral building. They thereby kicked off one of the most massive protest cycles in recent history.

From March 19 to March 26, close to a million people gathered every day in cities and towns around Turkey, both small and big. The CHP first declared that the big gatherings would end, with the last one on Wednesday. But popular pressure pushed them to declare one more on Saturday. Despite this wavering, the higher command still strives to keep the protests contained.

The students are radicalizing the protests and the party, but for now they are mostly alone. Other than small left-wing parties, no organized force is joining them to pressure the CHP into a more contentious direction. There are many understandable reasons for this, and they are different for each potential ally.

The most conspicuous absence is the organized Kurdish movement. Countless Kurdish individuals have joined the protests. But the organized movement is not weighing in. The stage belongs to the CHP, and quite nationalist messages are common (as when the leader of the party’s nationalist faction belittled Newroz celebrations and called Kurdish flags “rags”), even if later apologized for. Although a small minority, a couple of thousand young people in some demonstrations have chanted racist slogans targeting the Kurds, which has had a chilling effect on Kurdish participation. The government’s negotiations with Kurdish civil political leaders and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and its armed affiliates in Syria are another factor in the organizational absence of the Kurds. It appears that there is a realistic chance for peace, and the movement is avoiding any major confrontation with Erdoğan for now. Nevertheless, the Kurdish-led Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM) just announced its decision to participate in the demonstration planned for Saturday. If the party indeed participates with full force, this could be a game changer.

Alevi neighborhoods and towns, which have been the strongholds of the Left among the poor in Turkish and Kurdish history, are not rising up as they did during the Gezi protests in 2013. These poor and beleaguered neighborhoods are usually in the outskirts of cities, just like Alevi towns and villages are in more mountainous regions. Centuries of persecution kept Alevis away from town centers during Ottoman times, a pattern conservative forces during republican times reproduced, even if with less severity. The current silence of Alevi neighborhoods is also more than understandable: the Turkish police forces, though brutal at times, did their best to avoid deaths during much of the protests in and around Taksim in 2013. But when it came to Alevi towns and neighborhoods, they unleashed a sectarian (and also anti-socialist) hatred that ended up taking several lives. Today, especially after the sectarian massacres that killed more than a thousand in Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)–ruled Syria in mid-March, Alevis have been living under intense threat. The Turkish government media packaged the massacres as routine cleansing of residual supporters of former dictator Bashar al-Assad, going against even HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani’s framing, which blamed out-of-control fighters rather than denying that civilians were killed en masse. Since the Sunni urban poor are squarely in Erdoğan’s corner, nonparticipation by organized Alevis also means relative quiet in poor areas.

Even though many militant labor leaders are calling for a general strike, this is not a mass demand yet. Both the centrist and left-wing major confederations will avoid turning this into class resistance, which would be extremely risky for them. Unions in Turkey face the same neoliberal pressures as others throughout the world and have lost much of the momentum that they had before the 1990s. They deliver little to their membership, let alone shoulder broad popular demands as they once did, especially in the 1970s. Therefore, as elsewhere, they face popular suspicion. But in Turkey there is the additional burden of operating under an authoritarian government, with heavy competition from the Erdoğanist-sponsored corporatist union confederation. Despite these factors, unionization saw an uptick in the late 2010s, which makes some confederation leaders paradoxically more cautious, as they don’t see themselves as capable of transforming this uptick into a surge. Only more bottom-up pressure can change their stance.

Erdoğan’s Cards

Why couldn’t the government foresee this popular response, and what can it do now to salvage the situation?

Erdoğan’s timing for the crackdown was horrible — and has backfired, for now. He was both too self-confident and paradoxically too insecure. First of all, this was because he had just enjoyed his greatest imperialist victory in Syria; government ideologues sounded certain that they had changed world history.

The second reason for the government’s bloated self-confidence was the Kurdish peace process: Erdoğan’s camp (in some ways accurately) calculated that if it waged a total war against Turkish democracy, Kurds would not come to the rescue. But there have been complications too: rumblings within the governing bloc have started to slow down and perhaps even derail the negotiation process. Moreover, there are signs from Syria that the negotiations between HTS and the Kurdish forces there might not be moving in the direction Erdoğan desired. Partly as a result of these complications, even though there is no organized Kurdish movement presence in the demonstrations, many Kurdish leaders have forcefully opposed the latest crackdowns, surprising Erdoğan.

Third, and most importantly, Donald Trump’s return to the US presidency is the primary “conjunctural” factor that boosted the Erdoğanists’ self-confidence. Not mistakenly, regime ideologues believe the world radically changed after Trump’s election on November 6, to the advantage of leaders like Erdoğan. However, not everything went according to plan. Erdoğanists were counting on Trump to take some decisive step soon after his inauguration on January 20 that would settle the Kurdish issue in Turkey’s favor. But this move never came.

Simultaneously with these confidence boosts, Erdoğan had been facing dwindling popularity, especially due to the intensifying cost-of-living crisis. At the height of his imperialist success and the trough of his economic performance, Erdoğan knew he was walking into a risky electoral contest. So he seems to have decided to end everything with a coup, in order to make sure no free and fair election could end his reign and therefore his imperial project.

Even though his coup seems to have backfired for now, Erdoğan still holds a lot of cards: Trump, the European Union (which doesn’t want another refugee crisis), and the global and national business communities are currently on his side, at least through their silence. Erdoğan’s post-June 2023 finance minister, Mehmet Şimşek, is the one who impoverished the population and put the governing bloc in a difficult situation, but his policies are the reason why global capitalism and Turkey’s usually anti-Erdoğan business association TÜSİAD and are silent.

Prospects

The opposition thus finds that its usual sources of major support — the local business community, the EU, the United States, and “international markets” — are unlikely to defend it effectively. To break out of this position, it will instead need to shift to the left and a more confrontational approach. However, entrenched in its post-1990s centrism, the CHP is still trying to contain the boiling popular anger rather than transform it into a disciplined, purposive, working-class anger. Only more popular pressure can break its obstinacy. Are there any prospects for such a shift?

Today the brainpower and muscle of the resistance are on campuses, and more visibly in CHP demonstrations. Students at the major universities such as Istanbul Technical University and Istanbul University, as well as a series of universities of all sizes and stature throughout the land, are boycotting classes. The boycott wave was initiated by Middle East Technical University, which has been a hub of democratic, anti-imperialist, and socialist activism ever since the 1960s. These are active boycotts: students are not simply skipping class, holding demonstrations and marches, and voicing their demands regarding education but are organizing with an eye on the nationwide protests and discussing how to further politicize them. But it would be fatal if the resistance remained restricted to these two venues, for this would reproduce one of the AKP’s main axes of grievance organization: the allegedly “local and national” AKP vs. the “estranged” and “elitist” CHP.

Turkish universities typically see waves of mobilization every few years. In the recent past, protests regarding education, the imposition of appointees, and the mismanagement of earthquake relief rocked universities. But none of these could break the AKP regime’s framing of education as “elitist.” It is too early to tell whether the mobilization will persist or grow, or whether it will go beyond campuses and CHP venues and make a dent in the government’s framing. Student protests have led to an unlikely resistance movement, but on their own they can’t transform it into a working-class movement with a constructive agenda.

The resistance against Erdoğan’s coup is already a people’s movement: poor, working-class, and upper-middle-class people of all ideological colors have been gathering in cities and towns across Turkey and defending the competitive electoral system. However, the poor and the working class is not participating in their capacity as a class. Several unions leaders, along with student leaders and socialist groups, have been trying to push the major confederations into a general strike. Movement participants are already engaging in deliberations regarding the strengths and limits of the current mobilization, signaling readiness to repivot. It is clear at this point that students have opened the way to mass protests, but CHP gatherings have not yet created a space for broader coalitions that could end Erdoğan’s reign and lead to a sustainable democracy. The next few weeks will show whether other popular forces will intervene to shift the balance.