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Journalism of Courage
Kemal Kilicdaroglu, chairman of Turkey’s main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi or CHP in Turkish), will be the candidate of an alliance of six opposition parties against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the presidential election expected to be held on May 14. The electoral calendar begins on March 10, and Kilicdaroglu announced his candidature on Monday (March 6).
For the past several years, commentators have billed Kilicdaroglu as a modern-day Turkish equivalent of Mahatma Gandhi, and he is sometimes called “Gandhi Kemal” in the Turkish media because, as a Reuters profile of the opposition leader said, “of a passing resemblance with his (Gandhi’s) slight, bespectacled appearance”. Like Gandhi, Kilicdaroglu’s political style is “humble”, a report in POLITICO said.
Kilicdaroglu’s party, the centre-left CHP, is Turkey’s oldest political party, which was established by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the modern Turkish nation.
Can Dundar, a former editor of the Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet who has been living in exile in Germany since 2016, wrote in an opinion article in The Washington Post in June 2017 that Kilicdaroglu earned the nickname ‘Gandhi’ soon after being elected head of the CHP in 2010, but “the moniker had more to do with his faint physical resemblance to the Indian independence leader than with any similarities in revolutionary credentials or background”.
When Kilicdaroglu’s deputy Enis Berberoglu, a journalist who had long been targeted by President Erdogan, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for alleged espionage, Kilicdaroglu began a 450-km protest march to Istanbul from Ankara with a large group of supporters. This march fired the public imagination and catapulted Kilicdaroglu onto the opposition frontline.
“Building on the Gandhi analogy, some are…comparing Kilicdaroglu’s protest with the Indian leader’s famous Salt March of 1930, when he and his followers walked 240 miles to the sea coast to protest the British colonial monopoly on the production and sale of salt,” Dundar wrote in the 2017 article.
He added that while “Gandhi’s Salt March led in the short term to the arrest of 60,000 participants, though the British were later forced to release them all”, in Turkey, there are 200,000 of them, and all 372 prisons in the country are filled to capacity”.
There is no definitive estimate of the number of political prisoners in Turkey currently, but the country’s Directorate General of Prisons and Houses of Detention (CTE) said a year ago that as of February 28, 2022, the number of inmates was 309, 558.
Kilicdaroglu, now 75, is a career civil servant who headed Turkey’s Social Security Agency for many years, and entered politics only after retirement, Dundar wrote in The Washington Post piece.
An Al Jazeera profile said he was born in 1948 in the eastern Turkish city of Tunceli, in a family that followed the minority Alevi faith. Alevis are followers of Haji Bektash Veli, a 13th century Persian-Turkish dervish who taught an esoteric and humanist form of Islam.
Kilicdaroglu read economics at the Ankara Academy of Economics and Commercial Sciences (now Gazi University), and went on to occupy top positions in Turkish economic and financial institutions in both the government and private sector, and also taught at Hacettepe University in Ankara, according to the Al Jazeera profile.
Kilicdaroglu entered the Turkish parliament as a member of the CHP from Istanbul in 2002, after the same election that brought Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi or AKP) to power for the first time.
He became a prominent critic of corruption in Turkey, and was re-elected to parliament in 2007. In 2009, he unsuccessfully contested the election to become mayor of Istanbul and, in 2010, after the veteran politician Deniz Baykal resigned as chairman of the CHP following a scandal involving a leaked video, Kilicdaroglu became the chairman of his party.
At that party convention, Kilicdaroglu was feted as “clean and honest”, and the new leader told his cheering supporters: “We are coming to power. We are coming to protect the rights of the poor, the oppressed, the workers and labourers,” Reuters reported.
However, the CHP has not been electorally successful under Kilicdaroglu, as Erdogan has mostly steamrolled the opposition over the past decade and, according to the Reuters report, the CHP’s support has never crossed 25%. The biggest success for the party came in 2019, when its candidates won mayoral elections in five out of Turkey’s six largest provinces, including Ankara and Istanbul.
The CHP’s election performance aside, Kilicdaroglu’s success has been seen in the quiet reformation of the party, in which the more rigid Kemalist old guard has gradually lost ground to leaders who are closer to more modern social democratic ideals of Europe.
Kilicdaroglu received the formal backing of five smaller opposition parties along with his own CHP — known as the “Table of Six” — on March 6 after Meral Aksener, the leader of the IYI Party, put aside her objections to Kilicdaroglu’s candidature and her demand that Ekrem Imamoglu or Mansur Yavas, the CHP mayors of Istanbul and Ankara respectively, run instead.
It was agreed as part of the compromise that should the opposition bloc win the election, Imamoglu and Yavas would be vice-presidents. The IYI is a major opposition player, and Reuters quoted political analyst Galip Dalay as saying, “These three political actors (Kilicdaroglu, Imamoglu, and Yavas) represent different visions and electorate base, so the IYI Party, in particular, sees itself in a stronger position dealing with a government where Imamoglu and Yavas are included.” Imamoglu has close ties with Aksener, and Yavas is on the right of the CHP, the Reuters report said.
“We will rule Turkey with consultations and compromise,” Kilicdaroglu declared after his candidature was announced. “We will establish the rule of morality and justice together,” he told his partners.
Analysts have said Kilicdaroglu has been handed a platform by years of economic crisis in Turkey that has seriously weakened the Lira, and the worsening of the situation in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake in eastern Turkey the death toll from which is now close to 50,000.
The Reuters report mentioned that while Kilicdaroglu’s detractors say he lacks Erdogan’s power to rally and capture audiences, and has no clear or convincing vision for what a post-Erdogan era looks like, his backers underscore his reputation as an ethical bureaucrat and an honest man.
Polls have predicted a tight election for both the presidency and parliament, and no one underestimates the charisma and guile of Erdogan, who has been first prime minister and then president of Turkey since 2003, and is not expected to leave power easily.
