Political parties are not organizations created solely to win elections. At least not historically.
Parties also represent a memory, an intellectual tradition, a worldview and a political ethos. What sustains them is not just their vote share, but the common answer their members and voters give to why they are together.
For many years, the Republican People's Party was just such a political tradition.
What made it different was not only its founding party identity, its historical heritage or its six arrows. What made the CHP different was that it had an institutional mind that could function independently of leaders. Within the party, different views would struggle, factions would clash, leaders would be criticized, but in the end, institutional loyalty would prevail over personal loyalties.
Today, we see a different picture.
Moreover, the reasons for this change are not only leadership crises or organizational problems, as one might think.
The real break came after 2019.
Because not only defeats transform political movements. Sometimes successes do too. In fact, often the greatest corruptions begin after success.
The 2019 local elections were not just an electoral victory for the CHP. It was also its access to a wider sphere of economic, institutional and political power than it has had in many years.
The metropolitan municipalities, especially Istanbul and Ankara, were not only local administrative authorities. These municipalities also became centers of budget, employment, tenders, media visibility, cultural influence and political cadre production.
It was at this point that a historical paradox emerged.
A political culture that for years criticized the ruling party for integrating with the state has faced similar risks of corruption in its own local areas of power.
Because when economic power increases, not only opportunities increase.
It is also a test of character.
A movement can live by principles while in opposition. Ideas are more valuable when resources are limited. People join a cause because they believe in it, not to gain a position.
But as power grows, the center of gravity of the organization begins to change.
The thought retreats.
The position stands out.
The principle is withdrawn.
Relationship networks come to the fore.
The political struggle retreats.
Career calculations come to the fore.
This is the essence of the transformation in the CHP.
The crisis in the party today is not a crisis of ideology.
It is a crisis of character.
There was a time when struggles within the party were fought over programs and policies. Questions such as what social democracy should be, how the state should be restructured, on which ground secularism should be defended were the real topics of discussion.
Today, a significant part of political debates is shaped around individuals.
The truth or falsity of an opinion is not judged by its internal consistency, but by who defends it.
Loyalty tests replace political arguments.
Criticism is often seen as betrayal.
This is not only an organizational problem.
This is a deterioration of political culture.
In the process of oligarchization described by Robert Michels a century ago, decision-making mechanisms become narrower. However, today's process goes beyond this.
Not only decisions are no longer centralized.
Thought is also becoming centralized.
Those who think differently are silenced, criticism is considered hostile, and leaders and mayors form small circles of loyalty.
At this point, the concept of lumpenization gains importance.
As used here, lumpenization is not an economic category.
On the contrary, it is the impoverishment of political culture despite the expansion of economic opportunities.
Lumpenization is the detachment from intellectual production, the erosion of organizational memory, and the shift from ideas to emotions in politics.
The first sign of lumpenization is when insult replaces argument.
The second symptom is that criticism is perceived as hostility.
The third symptom is the identification of leaders and power centers with the party.
After this stage, people don't defend programs.
They defend individuals.
They do not protect principles.
They protect their side.
They do not search for the truth.
They try to maintain the comfort of their own camps.
In the sense expressed by Antonio Gramsci, no political movement can establish hegemony without intellectual production.
In recent years, however, the production of slogans has replaced the production of ideas.
Campaigns replace programs, communication strategies replace ideology, and social media reflexes replace political theory.
The politics of the digital age has prioritized visibility over depth.
It is not the correctness of an idea that matters, but how much applause it gets.
This is dangerous for every political party.
But for a movement that has built its historical legitimacy on institutionalism, modernization and intellectual accumulation, it has much more devastating consequences.
As conceptualized by Pierre Bourdieu, every institution rests on an invisible symbolic capital.
The symbolic capital of the CHP was institutionalism, state experience, secularism, modernization and intellectual accumulation.
Today this capital is being rapidly depleted.
Instead, social media outrage, personal loyalty networks, power clusters around the municipality and everyday clique struggles are substituted.
There can be no greater impoverishment for a political movement.
Because movements that lose their ideas lose their direction.
Movements that lose their institutions lose their identity.
Movements that lose the culture of criticism eventually lose their claim to freedom.
History shows us that many parties have collapsed not because they lost elections, but because they lost themselves after coming to power.
The main question facing the CHP today is not whether it can win elections.
The question is this:
Has the post-2019 economic and political power transformed this movement into a deeper, more productive and more institutionalized structure?
Or has it turned it into an ordinary power organization where loyalties replace ideas?
If the second possibility is true, there is not only a political problem.
There is a cultural decay.
And no electoral victory can make a movement that has lost its intellectual backbone truly successful.