Istanbul Today, more than 60 million Turks are voting for their parliament and the country’s future president. The challenger to incumbent Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Kemal Kilicdaroglu of the left-wing CHP, is backed by five conservative parties. The alliance is considered to be extremely different and fragile – and that is precisely why it could get the 74-year-old politician into office.
Six parties are brought together in the “National Alliance”, the alliance has existed since 2017. At that time, several parties had joined forces to campaign against a planned constitutional referendum that would allow President Erdogan to expand his power. From Erdogan’s point of view, the referendum was successful. The alliance against him remained in place in order to coordinate joint action in the next elections. In the 2018 presidential and parliamentary elections, a joint candidate from the group again failed against Erdogan.
The alliance remained in existence and even accepted new parties. The alliance is led by the Republican People’s Party CHP. The party was founded by the founder of the state Atatürk, making it the oldest party in the country. When Kemal Kilicdaroglu became party leader in 2010, he initiated a shift to the left within the party, which was considered extremely nationalistic at the time.
The party’s logo consists of six arrows that correspond to Atatürk’s basic principles: republicanism, laicism, populism, revolutionism, nationalism and statism, which means partial state control of the economy. As the largest opposition party, the CHP has been the most important opposition faction in the Turkish National Assembly since the 2002 elections and has held 135 of the 600 seats since the June 2018 parliamentary elections. It is the only centre-left party in the alliance.
The second largest party in the alliance, the nationalist Iyi Party, is led by former Home Secretary Meral Aksener. After she was expelled from the right-wing nationalist party of the Nationalist Movement (MHP) in 2016 in the course of a dispute over direction, she founded her own party in 2017. In the 2018 elections, her party won 36 seats straight away.
The former interior minister founded her own party in 2017.
(Photo: AP)
On March 3, Aksener resigned from the alliance because she opposed the nomination of Kemal Kilicdaroglu as the alliance’s presidential candidate. She spoke publicly of having been betrayed and wished for one of the opposition mayors of Istanbul or Ankara as a candidate. Both of them, Ekrem Imamoglu from Istanbul and Mansur Yavas in Ankara, are now candidates for the post of deputy president, as are Aksener and the four party leaders of the other members of the alliance – for an office whose powers the alliance actually wants to curtail significantly.
The third largest party, the Democratic Party (DP), describes itself as conservative. Only their party leader is represented in parliament, and that’s only because the Iyi party gave him a seat after the 2018 election. The party rarely gets more than one percent in polls, mostly from rural folk. Your party logo, a white horse, is derived from a corruption of the party name. Many Turkish people used to be unable to pronounce the word “democrat” and instead said “Demir Kirat”, which means “iron white horse” in Turkish.
German Office for the Protection of the Constitution involved
The “Party of Happiness” (Saadet) is an Islamist party and was part of the Milli Görüs movement, whose German arm is under surveillance by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. In an earlier party program, the party described US policy as “bloody occupation policy” and “racist imperialism”. At the time, the party rejected EU membership, but it is not known what its position is now. A 2003 article by their press mouthpiece, the Milli Gazete, denied the Holocaust. The Saadet party received two seats in parliament via a CHP electoral list.
The Party for Democracy and Progress was founded in March 2020 by the former economics minister of the Erdogan party, Ali Babacan. The other founding members include two other former AKP ministers and four former members of Erdogan’s AKP.
From 2009 to 2015, Babacan was Minister of Economy of Türkiye.
(Photo: IMAGO/ZUMA Wire)
Babacan finished high school and college at the top of his class, then worked as a management consultant in Chicago. He was one of the co-founders of the ruling AKP party. When Erdogan first brought him into the cabinet, Babacan was only 35 years old. From 2009 to 2015 he was economics minister for the AKP, during which time the lira lost 55 percent in value. He describes his party as liberal-conservative. Babacan describes himself as strictly Muslim, and his wife wears a headscarf.
The alliance lacks a majority for a constitutional amendment
The founder and head of the sixth party in the alliance, Ahmet Davutoglu from the Future Party, has also previously made a career in the AKP. Under Erdogan he was first foreign minister and later even prime minister. In March 2016, Davutoglu, as AKP Prime Minister, negotiated the refugee agreement with the EU. Shortly thereafter, he had to resign because of differences with Erdogan and the party executive. In the opposition alliance he is now fighting for the abolition of the agreement. In Ankara he is seen as the designated EU minister in a new government.
The former foreign minister under Erdogan is campaigning for the abolition of the refugee agreement with the EU, which he negotiated himself in 2016.
(Photo: IMAGO/ZUMA Wire)
Presidential candidate Kilicdaroglu is also supported by the pro-Kurdish HDP, the second largest opposition party in parliament, which is not officially part of the electoral alliance. Support for the party quickly became the coalition’s open flank, with many in the country assuming the HDP has ties to the PKK.
Some MPs and officials of the group are related to or married to former or active PKK members. At the same time, the party stands for further reconciliation with Kurds in the country. The HDP has not fielded its own presidential candidate and recommends supporters to vote for Kilicdaroglu.
The alliance has created a 240-page election manifesto. However, the biggest and, according to observers, the only real election promise is the abolition of Erdogan’s presidential system. By amending the constitution, the coalition would like to set up a “reinforced parliamentary system” in which various institutions are involved in policy-making and not, as is currently the case, primarily the president himself.
The problem: the alliance is likely to lack the necessary three-fifths majority for such a constitutional change. According to everything that is known so far, if the coalition wins the elections, it would have to govern the entire legislative period in Erdogan’s presidential system. Only in the next ballot, or in the case of early elections, could the coalition again seek a three-fifths majority.
The alliance is anything but a bulwark against the conservative Islamic president. Many are already talking about the fact that it could only be a transitional government. But what sounds like an unselectable alliance and many uncertainties in the event of an election victory is exactly what Erdogan’s opponents want: an alliance that gets the ruling president out of office – and then sees how things can continue.
More: Elections in Turkey – new government, new problems?