CHP did not reach this point in a day. It did not come to this point with a coup, a pressure or a foreign intervention. The CHP reached this point slowly, by keeping silent, getting used to it and surrendering to individuals. What happened today is not an electoral defeat; it is a loss of will. And a loss of will is the most severe collapse a party can experience.
It all started when personal survival was placed at the center of politics instead of principle. When a politician starts presenting his own file, his own future, his own risks as “the fate of the country”, there is no longer politics, but emotional hostage-taking. This is exactly the line Ekrem İmamoğlu has followed in recent years: Blessing his own political entrapment with the discourse of democracy and national will.
The CHP administration did not stop at this point. Not only that; it adopted, spread and protected this language. Thus, the party unwittingly turned into a defensive reflex, or worse, a shield organization. From being an opposition party that talks about the problems of the country, the CHP has evolved into a structure that defends the political file of a person.
However, this story did not start with the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality. Since the Beylikdüzü Municipality, zoning decisions, tender processes, municipality-capital relations have been discussed in public. Questions were asked. Answers were demanded. But transparency did not come. Audit was not carried out. The CHP administration took a position that did not “call to account” but tried not to bother. This was a choice. And that choice was the first brick of today's decay.
The key question here is:
Is it the duty of a party to protect a politician or to hold him to account on behalf of the electorate?
The moment this question was answered incorrectly, the CHP went astray.
One of the breaking points was the 38th Congress. While the allegations of closed-circuit Zoom meetings, delegation design, block lists and behind-the-scenes organization were obvious, the CHP administration did not take a clear stance. Neither a clear denial, nor a transparent statement, nor a call for an independent audit. Silence was preferred.
But politics does not forgive silence.
Silence here is not neutrality, it is taking a position.
In a country like Turkey, which has experienced FETÖ plots and paid the price of collapsing its institutions from within, closed, uncontrolled and undisclosed political organizations cannot be considered ordinary. What were these meetings for? Who was present? Was the will of the congress really free? Without answers to these questions, there can be no such thing as “internal party democracy”.
When we dig deeper from here, we encounter the identity contradiction that the CHP has been avoiding to face for years. It is not a crime in itself that a political figure presented today as “center-left, secular, populist” comes from a background that is no stranger to right-wing, conservative, sectarian and congregational sociology. However, what is essential in politics is not to deny the past, but to come to terms with it.
This is why the allegations of contact with Samanyolu circles and the relations established with the media and community networks of that period are important. No one is setting up a court here. But after what Turkey has gone through, it is unacceptable to declare these topics unspeakable. The CHP, the founding party of the Republic, cannot afford to “keep silent” in the face of these questions. Every unexplained relationship, every gap, raises suspicion.
The picture is also clear on the issue of sects. The CHP is secular in rhetoric and cautious in practice. It is tough on the rostrum and soft in the field. It has a policy of balance and management that does not frighten anyone, does not fight with anyone. This understanding is not secularism. This is a pragmatism that makes the values of the Republic a bargaining chip. Atatürk's CHP is not such a party; this is not how it was founded.
And at this point, the issue must be clearly named:
As the CHP is being taken over: Ozgur Ozel's Silence, Imamoglu's Guardianship
Today, the CHP is not suffering an electoral loss, but a loss of will. This loss can no longer be hidden: The leadership of the party has been effectively handed over to someone else's political agenda through Özgür Özel. The will that governs the CHP and the will that speaks for the CHP no longer stand in the same place.
Özgür Özel may be sitting in the chairmanship, but the direction of politics, the harshness of language, the framework of crises and “untouchable areas” are determined from another center. Today, the CHP has turned into an individual's political defense line rather than a party. This is one of the greatest injustices to the party's history.
Imamoğlu's language, which turns his own political files into a “national issue”, is embraced by the CHP administration with absolute loyalty, let alone being questioned. Slogans are shouted instead of discussing the law, victimization is marketed instead of being held accountable. This is not opposition, but the politics of personal survival.
Özgür Özel's real responsibility starts right here. The CHP chairman is responsible for protecting the party, not hiding behind a name. However, since the 38th congress, Özel has preferred to watch what is going on instead of leading the CHP. He has not put forward a single clear political will in the face of the allegations of closed organization, Zoom meetings and internal party design discussions regarding the congress process.
This silence is not innocent.
This silence is surrender.
The party founded by Atatürk cannot be governed by closed-circuit relations, unaccountable political networks and declaring untouchable figures with questionable pasts. The CHP is a party that has been the target of FETÖ plots. The leadership of such a party cannot answer questions about its past with “silence”. Silence is not a choice here, but political irresponsibility.
Even more serious is the deliberate erosion of the CHP's ideological backbone. Secularism is in the party program but not in practice. The distance from sects remained in rhetoric and turned into a policy of “not disturbing” on the ground. Relationships recruited from the right, conservative balances, and a pragmatism that condones the sociology of the community are the de facto politics of the CHP today.
This picture is not left.
This picture is not populist.
This table is not Ataturkist at all.
Özgür Özel now has a clear choice in front of him:
Either he will be a chairman who will return the CHP to its founding values, or he will be remembered as the person who reduced the party to the secretariat of one person's political career.
CHP is the party of principles, not leaders.
CHP grows not with stories of victimization but with accountability.
CHP does opposition not by keeping silent but by resisting.
What is happening today is not the pressure of the government; it is the surrender of the opposition.
And the political bill for this capitulation will be borne by history rather than the ballot box.
And the issue is not limited to individuals. The drift the CHP is experiencing today is the result of a conscious change of direction at the cadre and program level. The most concrete indicator of this change of direction is the way the names transferred from the IYI Party are positioned within the party.
Names like Adnan Beker, Cemal Enginyurt and Ümit Dikbayır joined the CHP and were legitimized with discourses of “expansion”, “center politics” or “balance”. However, politics is not done with a change of shop window, but with a program and mentality. It is a serious break in the CHP's historical line that these names have become influential not only by wearing badges, but also in the PM, around the MYK, in the areas where the party strategy is produced and in the narrow cadres that are effectively managed with the logic of a CEO office.
The problem here is not the transfer itself, but in exchange for what and by abandoning which axis.
The CHP is a party founded with a public sector economy approach. Defending the social role of the state, planning, public interest and pro-labor politics is the ideological backbone of this party. However, in recent years this backbone has been deliberately weakened. While publicism has been withdrawn, a market-friendly, technocratic, neoliberal language that says “let's not scare the investors” has been emphasized.
This is where the political reflex of these IYI Party-originated cadres came into play. Instead of a statist-publicist economic understanding, the clichés of “rational market”, “fiscal discipline” and “structural adjustment” borrowed from the center-right have infiltrated the CHP's official discourse. This is not just an economic preference; it is an ideological purge that obscures the class side of the CHP.
The CHP is no longer able to clearly state which economic model it proposes to pensioners, workers and the poor. Because the answers to this question are conflicting within the party. On the one hand, there is the claim of a social state, public planning and equality; on the other hand, there is the effort to “reassure the government” with neoliberal prescriptions. This dual structure does not grow the party; it paralyzes it.
What is even more striking is this: This move to the right has neither broadened the base nor paved the way to power for the CHP. On the contrary, the party has created ideological insecurity among its own voters. Left voters were pushed into the feeling that “others are speaking for us”. The CHP has turned into a space to whitewash the political pasts of others, while it has become unable to defend its own history and spirit.
At this point, Özgür Özel's responsibility comes to the fore once again. As the chairman, Özel, who is obliged to protect the party program and the ideological line, has not raised any objections, drawn any boundaries or set any direction in the face of this drift. There has not been a single serious political intervention against the erosion of the CHP's left-populist identity by this right-wing weight in the PM and its surroundings.
This brings us to the inevitable question:
By whom and with which mind is the CHP ruled today?
While internal party decision-making mechanisms are gradually shrinking, politics has been compressed into a technical and communication-oriented field determined by a handful of names. The “CEO office” analogy is not in vain. The CHP is being transformed from a mass party whose grassroots speaks out into a corporate machine that manages crises, produces perceptions and defends files.
This understanding is against the DNA of the CHP.
CHP is the party of the public, the people, the laborers, secularism and national sovereignty. It cannot move forward with political reflexes borrowed from the right, nor with neoliberal memorizations, nor with personal survival calculations. If it follows this path, the party will not only lose elections; it will lose itself.
The crisis the CHP is facing today is not a crisis of names; it is a crisis of direction.
And this direction cannot be corrected by silence, by transfers, by eroding the program.
The CHP will either return to its nationalist, secular, populist and founding line, or it will turn into an anonymous intermediate party carrying the political baggage of others.
History does not allow for postponing the answer to this question.
CHP has no right to this either.