How to Save Turkish Democracy

For Turkish democrats, last spring was supposed to be a moment of triumph. After more than two decades of increasingly autocratic rule, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president, appeared poised to lose office. The country’s robust economic growth—Erdogan’s longtime claim to fame—had ended. The Turkish lira was in free fall, making basic goods unaffordable for much of the population. When a devastating earthquake in February 2023 killed tens of thousands of people, Erdogan failed to properly respond. Polls suggested that the presidential election in May would be close but that opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu would emerge victorious.

Alas, he did not. Bolstered by a pliant media that drowned out any bad news, Erdogan came in first during the election’s opening round and then comfortably defeated Kilicdaroglu in the runoff. Erdogan’s party and its allies won an enormous majority in Turkey’s parliament, thanks in part to new electoral laws that skewed the body in the ruling party’s favor. Erdogan now appears to be more powerful than ever.

The victory has left Turkey’s pro-democracy forces despondent. Erdogan’s critics united behind a single candidate (something the opposition had long failed to do) and reminded Turks of the parlous state of the economy, but they still failed to dislodge the president. Few democrats see a way to bring an end to Erdogan’s tenure. Instead, many are just resigning themselves to waiting for the longtime ruler’s retirement.

But one route the opposition has not tried could bring about change—and it is a path that Kilicdaroglu’s defeat makes all the more clear. Although Kilicdaroglu heads the social democratic Republican People’s Party (CHP), he sought to defeat Erdogan by running as a right-wing candidate, competing on political terms set by the president. Kilicdaroglu embraced neoliberal economic policies and took an anti-immigrant stance. He promised to preserve the regime’s hard-line policies against Kurdish elected representatives. It is, therefore, little wonder that he was soundly defeated; he never offered an ideological alternative to the country’s frustrated citizens.

If the opposition wants to restore Turkish democracy, it must start drawing such a contrast. That means it needs to embrace progressive causes, instead of campaigning on conservative ones, and build up a viable labor movement. In other words, to take on the Erdogan regime, the Turkish opposition needs to turn resolutely to the left.

Reviving Turkey’s political left will be a daunting challenge. Turkish leftists face severe state oppression, and they will struggle to surmount the religious and nationalist identity politics that have given the right the upper hand. But Erdogan’s opponents can draw on the successes of the past. Leftists stood up against Turkey’s military rulers in the early 1970s and brought democracy back to the country. They did it by explicitly appealing to class ideology, using a call for social justice to transcend ethnic and sectarian divisions.

They can do so again. Erdogan has built a formidable bloc of conservative religious voters. But most of Turkey’s population still belongs to the working class, and many are disillusioned by the government’s laissez-faire policies. The country is also home to minority groups and other marginalized peoples who have been victims of the president’s exclusionary, right-wing nationalism. There exist, in other words, all the ingredients needed to forge a powerful, progressive constituency.

But to mobilize voters in this way and build a serious challenge to Erdogan’s regime, Turkey’s opposition will have to stop triangulating. It must instead embrace a progressive, unifying, economic message. Failure to do so will leave Turkey facing unrelenting authoritarian rule.

RUN IT BACK

At first glance, now might seem like a historically bad time to resurrect Turkey’s left. In polls, a majority of the country’s voters place themselves on the right. Of the 600 members of the Turkish parliament, at least 404 identify themselves as nationalist conservatives. Just 130, far from all of whom are left-leaning, belong to the social democratic CHP, and merely six belong to socialist parties.

The right’s power goes beyond just poll results. As in many other countries, union membership has experienced a precipitous decline over the last 20 years. The government has made a point of arresting progressive leaders and politicians. And the country’s main opposition politicians have close connections with right-wing parties. The conservatives in the newly elected Turkish parliament certainly owe much to Erdogan, but their majority is also partially the work of the CHP; the party voluntarily surrendered 40 seats in parliament to electorally insignificant right-wing allies in exchange for their support in the May election.

This is not the first time that Turkey’s left, including many proponents of Turkish democracy, has been pushed to the sidelines. In the 1960s, more than 70 percent of the country voted for conservative parties. In 1971, senior officials from the armed forces staged a bloodless coup d’état. But the left managed to overcome these obstacles. Bulent Ecevit, a social democrat who resisted the coup, won the leadership of the CHP in 1972 and embraced progressive causes. In 1973, under his leadership, the CHP became the leading party in parliament and formed a coalition government, ending military rule. In 1977, the party won a commanding reelection, taking 42 percent of the vote—a large margin by the standards of the country’s parliamentary system at the time. It remains the CHP’s best-ever electoral result. 

Now might seem like a historically bad time to resurrect Turkey’s left.

How did left-wing activists manage to dislodge Turkey’s authoritarians? In short, the regime’s opponents focused on economic redistribution, uniting nonelites in a campaign focused on ending inequality and exploitation. Ecevit rallied workers, the small peasantry, and the lower, urban middle class with a call for social and economic justice and equality that successfully transcended the cultural divisions of Turkey—a fact made clear when Ecevit won even in Turkey’s most religiously conservative regions. Ecevit defended the rights of labor and fought against the business elite, including by calling for initiatives to give workers a direct say in the running of their companies. It is an idea that Turkish democrats should revive today, one that would show they seek systemic change on behalf of the broad masses rather than just an end to Erdogan’s personal power.

Ecevit’s victories put Turkey on the same path as Greece, Portugal, and Spain, where democratic socialists also unseated right-wing authoritarians in the 1970s and moved their countries toward greater democracy. But in Turkey, the left never succeeded in evicting the armed forces and right-wing militias from politics. Ecevit failed to establish his authority over the state, and his attempts to introduce participatory democracy prompted resistance from the business elite. In 1980, the military again intervened, and Turkish progressives were crushed in another coup, this one violent. Leftist causes and ideas never fully recovered from the military’s oppression.

But the armed forces are not the only reason why progressive beliefs became marginalized in Turkey. Global politics also helped push the left to the sidelines. Throughout the 1990s, center-left parties around the world—including European social democrats—tilted to the right, and Turkey’s social democrats were no exception. The country’s leading left-wing intellectuals adopted free-market liberal beliefs, hoping that a business-friendly agenda would make their candidates more palatable. Some of them even began to support Islamic conservatives, who—unlike Turkey’s secular conservatives—were opposed to the military’s periodic coups and grasping bids to rule. As a result, many leading leftists backed Erdogan when he ran to be prime minister in 2002 on a pro-democracy platform, believing that he embodied the liberal hopes that had come to define the post–Cold War era.

It was a disastrous bet. Erdogan did subordinate the military, but he did so by turning it into a pillar of his regime. The presidential system that he designed and that was approved in a referendum in 2017 insulates him from the democratic aspirations of society. Tellingly, he has deployed state power to keep the working class subjugated and to maintain a system of exploitation. His officials have regularly banned strikes during his two decades as ruler, with authorities claiming that they threaten “national security.” The de facto suspension of the right to strike has ensured that wages are low. Meanwhile, Erdogan has raised taxes on low-income earners while offering capital owners tax breaks and allowing them to reduce pensions for workers. The public sector, which offered workers better conditions, has come under widespread attack.

COURSE CORRECTION

Unfortunately, the country’s left has not learned that it is a mistake to seek democratic salvation on the right. Since becoming party leader in 2010, Kilicdaroglu has steered the CHP in a conservative direction, including by making a sustained effort to embrace the religious right. Winning over religious voters is a key challenge for the opposition; Erdogan’s authoritarian camp uses culture wars to divide the electorate by keeping religious conservatives and more secular voters from joining forces. But pandering to religious sentiment, as Kilicdaroglu did, is insufficient. Kilicdaroglu failed to recognize that in order to reconcile voters with different degrees (and different kinds) of faith, he needed to advance a progressive economic platform that appealed to everyone.

Instead, Kilicdaroglu did the exact opposite. The CHP leader made no reference to income redistribution, progressive taxation, or labor rights during the campaign. In fact, he outwardly declared that there is no longer any difference between progressives and conservatives, because the right “also wants to aid the poor.” In other areas, he tried to buttress his majoritarian bona fides to appeal to right-wing populists. He pledged, for instance, to deport Turkey’s population of Syrian refugees—which he falsely pegged at ten million people (the real number is roughly three million)—within a year, and he promised that elected mayors who support Kurdish rights, as some do today, will be removed from office.

Shifting in this direction did not help Kilicdaroglu. He is now facing calls for his resignation—calls he should heed. But none of Kilicdaroglu’s likely successors offer a left-wing alternative. His main challenger, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, supports the same laissez-faire economic policies as Erdogan and Kilicdaroglu. So does the CHP parliamentary group leader Ozgur Ozel, who is known to covet the leadership role.

It is a mistake to seek democratic salvation on the right.

Turkey does have some prominent politicians with the correct instincts. One is Selahattin Demirtas, the former leader of the leftist and pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party. Demirtas has argued that the opposition should work to bring together people who are economically marginalized with those who are marginalized based on their ethnic, religious, or gender identity. Electorally, his proposal should be common sense. Roughly 70 percent of the Turkish workforce is employed in the construction, service, and manufacturing sectors and could, therefore, benefit from labor protection and wealth redistribution. Critically, this pool of voters includes large numbers of Turkish and Kurdish people. A left-wing candidate focused on addressing economic concerns could encourage both groups to make common cause and transcend their ethnic divisions. It is a way out of Turkey’s democratic impasse.

Yet Demirtas’s pleas have gone nowhere. Instead, his notion of a pan-Turkey left runs counter to the economic policies of the CHP and the ethnically exclusive objectives of Kurdish left-wingers. He remains without a political home.

As a politician, Demirtas does have some disadvantages. The fact that he is of a Zaza and Kurdish background would, sadly, complicate his ability to win mass support. But an opposition leader who chooses to draw attention to the country’s persistent and deep inequality would pose a serious challenge to the government.

And Turkey is, indeed, extremely unequal. According to the 2022 World Inequality Report compiled by the Paris-based World Inequality Lab, the bottom half of earners in Turkey possess only four percent of the country’s wealth, whereas the wealthiest ten percent owns 67 percent of that wealth. There is little to suggest that figure will change, especially since unionization rates have plummeted. When Erdogan first became prime minister in 2003, 58 percent of the country’s workforce was unionized. Today, the rate of unionization stands at around 14 percent.

Turkish leftists have been in a rut before.

The low levels of unionization make it clear that, despite the poor economic conditions, a left-wing candidate would need to work hard to build a solid political base. Such a candidate would also, of course, have to overcome Turkey’s authoritarian system, which is especially committed to keeping the left in check. There is a reason Erdogan had Demirtas arrested on made-up terrorism charges in 2016, even though Kilicdaroglu remains free.

Yet the fact that Erdogan’s government is so concerned with the left is testament to how much progressives threaten the system. And Turkish leftists have been in a rut before. Although down and out in the 1970s, the country’s left worked to mobilize labor and made it possible for Ecevit to rise and to break through military rule. And although Turkey’s unions may be smaller now than they were when Erdogan first took power, there are still millions of people in organized labor who cut across ethnic divides and could mobilize on behalf of a progressive candidate. Just as in the 1970s, the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions—an umbrella organization that represents many organized labor groups—could play a critical role in trying to organize workers against Erdogan. He has certainly helped the organizers’ cause by implementing harsh austerity measures that are bound to incite labor activism.

The greatest obstacle to the left, therefore, does not come from Turkey’s authoritarian repression or from its ethnic divisions, although both are serious obstacles. It does not come from Erdogan’s personal charisma, especially given that his governing Justice and Development Party won its lowest vote share in 20 years. It comes instead from progressives’ own ideological defeatism. Rather than moping, Turkish democrats need to realize that a challenge from the left can overturn Erdogan’s authoritarian system. Otherwise, right-wing autocracy will continue to dominate the country for as long as Erdogan remains president—and even after he’s gone.

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