Turkey: Opposition Party

"We have defeated the empire of fear in the party, and now we will defeat the empire of fear in Turkey," Kemal Kilicdaroglu told cheering party supporters in Ankara in early November.

Known in Turkey as "Gandhi Kemal" because of his physical slightness, his mild manners and his glasses, Kilicdaroglu was external pageelected head of the CHPcall_made this May, following the resignation of his predecessor in a sex scandal.

His arrival has raised hopes that the CHP, which ran Turkey as a single-party until 1946 and (apart from a blip in the 1970s) has been all but unelectable ever since, may soon be in position to give the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) a run for its money.

Known for his modest lifestyle and his well-documented exposes of AKP corruption, Kilicdaroglu has shied away from the ideological rigidity that has characterized the CHP over the past decade.

Despite describing his victory as a sign that "change has begun," he gave the impression of being shackled, promising radical policy changes one day, backtracking the next. Having repeatedly promised to "solve" bans on headscarves in state buildings, he declined to attend an October 29 reception hosted by the headscarf-wearing wife of Turkey's president.

His performance on the issue of rights for Turkey's non-Turkish ethnic groups was even more disappointing, given that he was born into a family speaking Dimili, an Indo-European language.

Known as Zaza, most Dimili-speakers today consider themselves Kurds. Kilicdaroglu didn't mention the word Kurd once during six weeks of campaigning for a September 12 referendum in which the Kurdish vote was key.

And when a senior CHP politician sparked a scandal by appearing to defend the CHP-backed massacre of thousands of Zaza women and children after a 1937 uprising, he simply said that he hadn't been "born when it happened."

The problem, many observers say, was that while he was leader, he was surrounded by senior party figures of a very different ideological bent, including Onder Sav, the CHP General Secretary for the past decade, and a party member for over half a century.

Widely thought to have had a hand in the resignation of Kilicdaroglu's predecessor and Kilicdaroglu's election, Sav raised the flag of revolt when Kilicdaroglu removed him from the party management.

For a moment it looked as though his weight within the party would prevail: when he called an assembly to protest Kilicdaroglu's move, 60 out of 80 party delegates declared themselves with him.

Kilicdaroglu was strengthened, however, by his grass-roots popularity, and the political skills of his number two Gursel Tekin, the CHP Istanbul chief whose narrow defeat in municipal elections last summer raised hopes that the CHP’s fortunes were rising. Tekin now appears to be the new eminence grise in the party.

Having initially threatened to fight Kilicdaroglu to the bitter end, Sav publicly handed over authority to the man Kilicdaroglu’s hand-picked choice to replace him November 10. "It was the end of an epoch in the party," says Mahmut Ovur, a journalist who follows the CHP closely. "Kilicdaroglu has real power now. The time of making excuses for not changing has come to an end."

Ovur compares CHP today to Turkey's Islamist movement at the end of the 1990s: freed of its ideological constraints by a team led by the now Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, it expanded from a relatively traditional Islamist party struggling to win more than 20 percent of the vote to a centre-right party capable of garnering over 40 percent support.

"Ideology has no place in Turkish politics anymore, and yet CHP is still promoting the six arrows" of Ataturk's ideology, he says. "Turkish voters want better services, not a vision of what the perfect society is."

Political scientist Ihsan Dagi agrees with Ovur in thinking Kilicdaroglu and his team understand the electoral landscape. He is less sure that party supporters have. "The founders of the AKP were lucky because the majority of their natural support base had realized the limitations of Islamist ideology," he says. "The CHP's support base strikes me as having backed itself into an ideological dead-end."

Like Dagi, the political scientist Hakan Yilmaz thinks CHP supporters' attachment to somewhat authoritarian ideas of secularism and national identity should not be a problem. "The efforts of some CHP supporters to set up hard-line secularist parties failed totally," he says. "These people have nowhere to go but the CHP."

But the signs are that Kilicdaroglu still feels the need to test the waters. "I want you to be clear of one thing," he told supporters on November 6. "When we talk of a new CHP, we reject the idea of forgetting our past. What we mean by 'new CHP' is new CHP leadership."

A liberal secular political commentator, Gulay Gokturk sees Kilicdaroglu's careful words as a warning to those hoping for a brand-new, electable CHP. "The social and political change Turkey is going through is eight on the Richter scale: nobody can stay still," she says. "How can you call Kilicdaroglu's one-step-forward-and-one-step-back approach change?"