Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu

Entrance into the parliament

The year of Kılıçdaroğlu’s retirement coincided with a pivotal moment in Turkish politics and society. The country’s security had stabilized after a period of political violence and a Kurdish insurgency, but the military continued to assert undue influence over public policy. Turkey’s economy, plagued by debt and inflation, was seeing rapid liberalization, which benefited a growing middle class in conservative Anatolia at the expense of the secularist urban elite in Turkey’s financial and business centres. Meanwhile, years of mismanagement and corruption of the government came to a head in 1999, as the country was ill-prepared for the İzmit earthquake, resulting in massive destruction and loss of life.

Kılıçdaroğlu had ideas for reform and sought to enter politics, but he failed to make the list for the ruling Democratic Left Party (DLP). After a financial crisis in 2001, however, his experience at senior levels of administration and his publications calling for the restructuring of the economy and bureaucracy made him an attractive candidate for the Republican People’s Party (CHP), which invited him to help it contest parliamentary elections in 2002.

After the elections, Kılıçdaroğlu entered a parliament with a transformed political makeup. Support for the prevalent political parties of the 1980s and ’90s had collapsed, and they failed to meet the electoral threshold. The CHP—the party established by Kemal Atatürk, the country’s founder, but reconstituted as a minority party in 1992—was one of only two parties to make it into the parliament. Although the CHP had made overtures to attract reformists like Kılıçdaroğlu into its fold, it continued to be dominated by the same Kemalist political class that had been responsible for decades of mismanagement. Moreover, at a time when Turkish women who wore an Islamic head covering (hijab) were prevented from attending university or entering other public spaces, the CHP offered no solutions for reconciling its staunch commitment to secularism with the disenfranchisement of women it was effecting. The party came in a distant second to the newly formed Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP), which promised to enact policies that would further liberalize both the economy and Turkish society.

Leadership of the Republican People’s Party (CHP)

Although Kılıçdaroğlu rose through the ranks of the CHP during the 1990s, the party remained in the opposition, as it maintained both its dated platform and its stale leadership. The AKP government—under the leadership of the charismatic Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—continued to be a powerful and popular force for change. In the 2000s the economy not only stabilized but boomed. Foreign investment and tourism were among the expansion’s drivers, as the government courted improved relations with the European Union. In 2008 the hijab ban on university campuses was revoked, and in 2010 constitutional amendments strengthened democratic standards (while also making the military more accountable to government oversight). That same year, matters became worse for the CHP when its leader was forced to resign amid scandal. Just days later Kılıçdaroğlu, who had lost a run for mayor of Istanbul the previous year, stood unopposed for the party leadership.

Under Kılıçdaroğlu the CHP shifted away from a statist stance and toward leadership that was more liberal and reform-oriented. The day after he was elected leader, party delegates replaced much of the old guard with younger members. In subsequent years, some of the old guard criticized Kılıçdaroğlu for diluting the CHP’s values and admitting into the party’s fold controversial members—for instance, a Kurdish activist and a union leader in 2011—at a time when the party was already vulnerable in elections.

Opening up the party to a variety of backgrounds, viewpoints, and lifestyles became a defining component of Kılıçdaroğlu’s leadership, which he eventually articulated as helalleşme (Turkish: “reconciliation,” literally “making halal”). One of the most visible transformations concerned the persistent issue of women’s head covering, about which Kılıçdaroğlu said in July 2020: “We made the headscarf issue the number one issue in Turkey. Why do you care about the headscarf? Let women wear what they want.” Later that month delegates for the first time elected a hijab-wearing woman to the party assembly.

But while Kılıçdaroğlu was overall a reformer, he was by no means a trailblazer. Although the CHP widened its stance on important issues, he remained largely within the confines of mainstream political norms. His increased inclusiveness still left out the country’s more than 3.5 million Syrian refugees, whom he characterized as a burden on both the economy and society. In May 2016 he supported legislation that lifted lawmakers’ immunity from arrest and prosecution, which opened the door for an emboldened AKP to arrest nearly a dozen Kurdish parliamentarians later that year. When a parliamentarian from the CHP was detained in July 2017, Kılıçdaroğlu led a 25-day protest march from Ankara to Istanbul. He was lauded for standing up to the government’s slide toward authoritarianism, but he offered little explanation for his failure to oppose the bill when it had been brought before the parliament.

Presidential election of 2023

While the CHP had shed its old guard under Kılıçdaroğlu, the AKP had increasingly focused on keeping Erdoğan in power. After the economic prosperity of the 2000s gave the AKP a nearly unbeatable popularity, the party began entrenching itself and stifling opposition in the early 2010s. It took a decisively authoritarian turn after a coup attempt in July 2016 provided the impetus to arrest dissenters and censor critics. In 2017 a constitutional referendum abolished the office of prime minister and granted new powers to the presidency, greatly strengthening the hand of Erdoğan upon his reelection to that office in 2018. The appointment of his son-in-law to run the finance ministry rattled an already vulnerable economy, setting off a recession and years of soaring inflation while Erdoğan wrestled with the central bank. In 2021 he stirred controversy over encroachments on academic freedom, and in 2022 the AKP enacted an ambiguous law against disseminating disinformation that effectively allowed it to target the press and public officials. The first high-profile complaint under the disinformation law was filed against Kılıçdaroğlu in November 2022, although no action was taken against him.

By the beginning of 2023 Kılıçdaroğlu was consolidating the joint backing of six opposition parties—known as the “Table of Six” or “National Alliance”—as a unity candidate to oppose Erdoğan in the upcoming election. Moreover, the largest party representing the country’s considerable Kurdish minority, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (Halkların Demokratik Partisi; HDP), chose not to field a candidate, and, in the weeks before the election, it called on its supporters to vote for Kılıçdaroğlu. Though Kılıçdaroğlu was not considered to be a particularly exciting candidate, the National Alliance hoped that his bureaucratic background and down-to-earth persona would appeal to voters against the tireless demagoguery of his opponent. As one Turkish academic described the situation to The New York Times: “This is not the election to open the gates of heaven. It is the election to close the gates of hell.”

In February 2023 an earthquake near the city of Gaziantep served as a stark reminder of the stakes of the election. Nearly a quarter of a century after the earthquake in İzmit, government mismanagement and corruption had failed to bring buildings up to code. By election day in May, more than 50,000 people had died in Turkey from the February tremors and their aftermath (and thousands more had died in neighbouring Syria), making the disaster deadlier than the 1999 earthquake. About one-seventh of Turkey’s registered voters lived in the area affected by the February quake, but only a fraction of the millions of displaced voters made the deadline to register to vote outside their hometowns.

Nonetheless, voter turnout reached nearly 90 percent and Kılıçdaroğlu came in second place with about 45 percent of the vote. Erdoğan for the first time received less than half of the votes, and he was forced to face Kılıçdaroğlu in a historic runoff election that was set for May 28.