Turkey’s Opposition Makeover

Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party, greets supporters during a rally in September 2010.

Even critics of Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party are admitting to pleasant surprise at the party’s new election manifesto.

For the last two elections, the party, generally known by its CHP acronym, had positioned itself as a hard-line secular and nationalist bulwark against the Islamist threat it claimed the ruling Justice and Development party, or AKP, posed to Turkey’s secular constitution. It didn’t work. At the last election in 2007, the AKP won 47% of the vote to the CHP’s 21%.

So, after purging a reluctant old guard from the party’s candidate list, CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu has put out an election manifesto that appears tailored to woo voters who previously rejected the party — namely, ethnic Kurds and liberals. The CHP’s election slogan for the June 12 polls: “Turkey will breathe freely.”

Last September, for example, the CHP tried and failed to block constitutional amendments in a referendum, saying they served the AKP’s political interests. Now the CHP is matching AKP proposals replace the constitution altogether.

The manifesto also promises to lower the 10% threshold — Europe’s highest — that Turkish political parties have to cross to get into Parliament. The threshold minimizes the risk of unstable coalition governments, but is widely seen as a ruse to keep any Kurdish party from getting into a position of power. The main Kurdish Peace and Democracy party runs its candidates as independents to get around that rule.

That pledge could appeal to Kurds in Turkey’s southeast, where the CHP drew few votes in 2007, leaving the field to the AKP and Kurdish independents. The CHP manifesto also pledges to form commissions to investigate the many unsolved murders of ethnic Kurds during heavy fighting between the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, and Turkish security forces in the 1990s. And it promises to turn Diyarbakir prison, notorious for the torture of Kurdish prisoners in the 1990s, into a museum.

For liberals, the CHP manifesto pledges press freedom — something that the AKP is widely criticized for failing to guarantee. Families are wooed by monthly family allowances, and youth by shorter military services.

All of that represents a makeover for the CHP from when Mr. Kilicdaroglu’s predecessor, Deniz Baykal, ran the party. He stepped down amid a sex scandal a year ago. Still, the AKP remains a hot favorite to win a comfortable third term majority and the CHP may have to go a lot further to peel voters away from it.

What Kurds really want, for example, is education in Kurdish and more autonomy in the southeast. Promising that, however, would alienate many Turkish voters. The CHP manifesto offers only Kurdish language classes for Kurds, something that’s already allowed in Turkey.

* Turkey’s 2012 Election

via Turkey’s Opposition Makeover – Emerging Europe Real Time – WSJ.