Something unexpected is happening in Turkey. A centrist party, which has been shifting ever further to the right over the last three decades, is being forced to act as a center-left party. Its leader, Özgür Özel, is taking the stage to make activist-like calls for boycotts, using what sounds like leftist language. As a prominent journalist just reported, the top party leaders are surprised at their own behavior. What accounts for this change, and for the popular anger that induced it?
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…
Auteur: Cihan Tuğal
