Where Have All the Leftists Gone?

A friend with little knowledge of Turkey recently asked me how an Islamist-oriented, rather conservative political party like AKP became the force of liberal reform in Turkey. Was this always the case? Is there no Turkish left? The questions would probably appall many Turks who identify themselves as anti-AKP and quite "liberal," but they are fair to ask. AKP's main opposition in parliament is formed by two nationalist parties that in many ways sound very much like each other, and by most definitions, are anything but leftist. In fact, recent discourse about Article 301 and the türban place CHP on the reactionary end of a left-right scale.

Highly-criticized in liberal circles, comprised of those who seek an expansion of personal liberties, but yet are critical of AKP's pro-market, libertarian-type ideology, Baykal's CHP is frequently seen as a barrier to the entrance of a viable leftist politics. While AKP exists as the only pro-Europe party, the party's center-right, liberal democratic credentials remain unchallenged. AKP, perhaps best considered a center-right party akin to Germany's Christian Democrats, is thus the only party capable of courting pro-Europe liberals. Thus, the leftist constituency in Turkish politics is left without adequate representation, their social democratic values left unvoiced in AKP's center-right politics or lost completely thanks to CHP's unrelenting nationalism and demagoguery, a seemingly right-wing, conservative politics more in line with the proto-fascist MHP than with the social democratic parties of Europe.

So, what is CHP's relation to the left? In name, the oldest party in Turkey and the party of Atatürk, CHP underwent many transformations in its long and turbulent history. Following the rise of leftist politics in the 1960s, CHP became the manifestation of Turkey's mainstream left. Under the leadership of Bülent Ecevit in the late 1960s and 1970s, CHP espoused a social democratic politics built on a Kemalist foundation. In many ways, its politics mirrored that found in the emerging social democracies of Europe, and it even joined the Socialist International. While it is true that the party always held true to a rigid protection of the state's secular identity, it also promoted civil liberties, and under Ecevit's leadership, decried military interference in politics. However, following the 1980 coup and a complete re-working of the political left, CHP re-emerged weak alongside an array of other parties, all of which fell short of representing the leftism that had changed the face of Turkish politics in the two decades prior to the military's violent intervention.

THE RISE OF THE TURKISH LEFT

Prior to the 1960s, there had been extreme leftist groups in Turkey who fell in line with the idea of a strictly statist economy to be centrally-planned and managed by the Turkish state. Statism was a central tenet of the old Kemalist regime, but the Kemalist understanding of statism did not approach central planning as a communist enterprise, but rather as a matter of national sovereignty and good government.

Importantly, the Kemalist regime of the early years of the republic did not oppose foreign investment and the state made little effort to regulate private investment. Turkish statism under the Kemalist regime did not mean that the state would interfere with private property rights or investment pursuits, but rather that the state would be responsible for capital-intensive industry. The state did create systemtatic schemes of central planning, but stayed determinedly away from adopting any sort of aggressively socialist or communist ideology. When price-fixing and other economic measures the government had taken proved disastrous in the 1940s, the government applied to join the IMF. With the election of the Democratic Party soon after, the economy began to open further under the helm of prime minister Adnan Menderes who encouraged direct foreign investment and sought foreign loans to bolster economic development. However, due to DP mismanagement, the investment led to little in terms of sustainable increases in productive capacity and a lack of regulation contributed to a high-level of growth from which only the richest benefited and inflation sky-rocketed. Economic disenchantment contributed to the demise of DP and the leftist politics that would come to pass in the 1960s.

Following the 1960 coup, a discourse began to develop among the intellectual left replete with prescriptions for state planning and protectionism. This leftist discourse was much abetted by the respect the military government paid to the academic left following the moderate turn it took when it dismissed ultra-nationalists from its ranks. The academic left had supported the military during the 1960 coup and the military had turned to it for assistance in drafting a new constitution. Thus, there was a tolerance for the rise of the more radical leftist politics that burgeoned in the 1960s.

Spurned by socialist dialogue elsewhere in the world and temporarily saved from government repression, many intellectuals began to propose radical reforms. Following the student movements in Europe and the United States, similar radical groups of young people began to emerge in Turkey and some of these began to call for radical revolution and sometimes through violent means. Many of these militant groups began to rebel against the state ideology or amalgamate its nationalist component with a communist narrative based on class solidarity. The state soon grew concerned by many of these groups and began to repress their more radical manifestations, but the radical left stayed largely intact up until the 1980 coup.

In the meantime, a more moderate form of democratic socialism was being embraced within the ranks of CHP. Following the 1960 coup, the party was also subject to the development of leftist thought experienced in the 1960s and following disappointing election results in 1961, adopted a center-left ideology that contrasted greatly with that of the Justice Party (Adalet Partisi—AP). While the AP supported a traditional understanding of Kemalism and took a combative and sometimes repressive posture to the emerging left of the early 1960s, CHP integrated the left's calls for social justice and democratic order into its party platform. Led by Bülent Ecevit, this effort stumbled in its beginning, but led to election victories in the municipal elections of 1968.

The party continued to consolidate its center-left stance throughout the latter part of the 1960s and into the 1970s. It was under Ecevit's leadership that CHP became a member of the Socialist International. However, as radicalism became a burgeoning problem on the fringes of the leftist movement and communism an ever greater fear, Ecevit found it increasingly difficult to integrate these more radical elements and a serious fragmentation began to occur. Although the center-left stance was certainly progressive when compared to the positions of its mainstream rivals, it never came to close to incorporating the sort of radical reform some demanded into its larger agenda nor did it ever have the political power to execute the progressive agenda to which it did aspire. In this end, Ecevit's progressive reform agenda did not successfully co-opt the more radical elements by way of any great re-working of society as happened in Europe.

THE 'POST-COUP' LEFT: DISASSEMBLY & RECONSTRUCTION (SORT OF)

Increasingly concerned with the radicalism of the left, the military staged its September 1980 coup—the aftermath of which virtually devastated leftist politics. Under the leadership of General Kenan Evren, the newly-established National Security Council (NSC) squelched political discourse and arrested over 10,000 people in its first weeks in power. Many of those arrested had been involved in leftist political activities and many were detained and tortured for indefinite periods of time. The NSC established the constitution under which the country is still governed and exercised tight control over the formation of political parties and in so doing denied the formation of any viable leftist opposition be it moderate or radical. This is significant in that political parties since 1960 are the principal structures in which organized political activity occurs and this development meant that the left was stifled from mainstream participation in politics for some time to come. The NSC also actively sought to purge leftist university professors, firing hundreds while coercing others to reform by threatening their pensions. In addition to the universities, the NSC activiely sought to eliminate any trace of lefist thought in civil society and among the press.

Thanks to the toleration of Turgut Özal's center-right Motherland Party (Anavatan Partisi—AVP), leftist politics began to reassert themselves in the 1980s. Özal's AVP emerged out of the aftermath of the 1980s coup and came to power following its overwhelming victory in the 1983 parliamentary elections, in which the party gained an absolute majority. Largely a rejection of the direction in which the NSC had taken the country following the coup, AVP reasserted the primacy of democratic politics and due to aims of its own, allowed some of the previously banned parties and the politicians that led them to participate in the 1984 municipal elections. During Özal's reign, leftism began a process of slow recovery, but never regained the strength or influence it had prior to 1980.

Erdal İnönü's newly-formed Social Democratic Party (Sosyal Demokrat Parti—SDP) was the most successful new party to emerge and reunited the disenfranchised liberals that had been ignored (if not repressed) in the early 1980s. The SDP contrasted with the People's Party (Halkçı—HP) that the military had allowed to run in the 1983 elections alongside AVP in that SDP represented the liberal wing of the old CHP and as HP had been little more than a construction of the military to create a party in which to place CHP's old conservative wing. Understandably, in the 1984 muncipal elections, SDP fared much better than HP, the latter of which failed to meet the 10 percent threshold it needed to enter parliament. However, both parties merged in 1985 to become the Social People's Party (Sosyal Halkçı Parti—SHP).

SHP became the more conservative of the two mainstream leftist parties when Bülent Ecevit re-emerged in 1985 to found the Democratic Left Party (Demokrat Sol Parti—DSP). Unencumbered by the conservative presence of the old CHP, Ecevit was able to move further to the left than before. DSP entered parliament in 1986, although it soon lost its voice in November 1987 when it was overshadowed by İnönü's SHP. Although these liberal parties were able to participate fully in democratic politics throughout the 1980s, the era's dominance by two center-right parties—AVP and Demirel's old AP—made it impossible for it to wield much influence.

Here enters Baykal and what some Turkish leftists pointedly refer to as "the new CHP": In the late 1980s, Baykal emerged within the ranks of İnönü's SHP to become its Secretary-General and began to openly challenge İnönü's leadership of the party. Repeatedly unsuccessful, Baykal decided to found his own party in 1992 and branded it CHP. Amidst the political sectarianism of the 1990s and the fragmentation of the two center-right coalitions, the leftist parties fared paritcularly poorly in the 1994 elections that brought to power the Islamic Refah Party (RP). Now faced with a common enemy, İnönü's old party (now under the leadership of Murat Karayalçın; İnönü had resigned in 1993) combined with Baykal's re-fashioned CHP in 1995.

The merger brought together two very strong personalities in a testy alliance, but both party leaders decided to step aside and Hikmet Çetin was chosen to lead the new party. Çetin was soon pushed aside by Baykal and the struggling party performed poorly in the 1995 elections depsite the alliance. Although a significant liberal coalition did emerge within the fragmentation of the two center-right parties and managed to pass through a liberalization package under pressure from the European Union (similar to the one currently being pushed by AKP), the coalition was divided on issues related to secularism and Baykal used the opportunity to oppose many of these reforms as a battling cry to garner power within CHP viz. espousement of an ideology that fell far from what should be called "liberal." Continually decrying the "Islamist threat," Baykal virtually became the CHP.

As the CHP became a virtually non-existent player following its massive defeat in 1995, Ecevit was able to regain his position as the leader of the left. Following the post-modern coup, Ecevit became prime minister when he posted the strongest showings in the 1999 elections (only 22 percent of the vote). However, as prime minister, Ecevit's coalition was not guided by liberalism, but by recalcitrant adherence to the the principles of secularism.

In 2002, Ecevit's health and his own stubbornness led the DSP coalition to fall apart and basically destroyed the DSP. In the elections to follow that year, DSP support fell 95 percent. Thus, as AKP came to power, CHP was able to reassert itself as the only viable alternative to Islamism. The party received only 19 percent of the vote, but Baykal's Leviathan has acted to quash dissenting voices in its ranks, aptly silencing would-be challengers. Further, it is deaf to criticism coming from leftists outside the country, most markedly to the criticism of the Socialist International, which is considering its explusion from the organization, a move welcomed by many leftists within Turkey.

WHERE ARE THE LEFTISTS?

In so many ways, the demise of the Turkish left can be attributed to its' members own dogmatic prescriptions for the role of religion in society. The left's strict interpretations of secularism and conflation of the Islamist threat have proved a serious distraction for the advocacy of the social and economic reforms that typify leftist existence in other countries. As the sole inheritor of the left's legacy, CHP is a frightfully sad representation of its past history. Caught up in what it imagines as a virtual state of war against Turkey's internal and external enemies, the CHP and its secular elite are more likely to espouse Hobbes than Rousseau or Mill. Rather than protecting free speech, it must be stifled to preserve the integrity of a state facing threats from Islamists and Kurds. Rather than allowing for democracy, elected parties must be periodically closed because they might threaten the nationalist or secularist order. Rather than joining truly social democratic nations in Europe, EU accession must be held circumspect because it involves a surrendering of centralized state control, a re-negotiation of secularism, and countenance liberalism, for individuals vested with too much liberty might act contrary to state ideology and the carefully devised plans of the ruling elite.

Many liberals have left CHP, casting relucant votes for the center-right and vaguely Islamist AKP rather than continue to support the stumbling block Baykal and the CHP have thrown up in the way of Turkey's larger political development. How many of the many "floating voters" that cast ballots for AKP in 2002, and again in 2004 and 2007, were disgruntled leftists, fed up with Baykal and CHP authoritarianism? Other liberals have continued to support CHP, but not without due anguish. Still, yet another group, perhaps not liberal, per se, but frustrated with Baykal and the CHP status quo while equally afraid of AKP's economic liberalization schemes and "creeping conservatism," continue to support CHP rather than wed themselves to a more liberal vision of Turkish politics, a liberal ideology that if properly formulated, might coalesce the reasons for their resentment toward AKP with an incipient support for individual liberties and democratic pluralism.

Meanwhile, CHP seeks to dissolve all challenge as evidenced by the party's plans to swallow DSP, which has retained a small membership base and a negligible presence in parliament as a result of the election of some of its members to parliament as independents. With the opposition crushed, Baykal maintains his stranglehold on the party, the recent türban amendments giving ample opportunity for the party leader to do what he does best—demagogue on secularism. Baykal's rallying cries that the amendments are proof that AKP is intent overturn the secular order of things are likely to further strengthen his position in the party , making it even more difficult for leftist challengers in CHP to oppose him come the party's spring congress. As Baykal beats the familiar rhythms of the CHP drum, its members continue to move in circular unison, in no direction and with no place to go.