TURKEY: CHP ENTERING ELECTION CAMPAIGN RUDDERLESS

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 03 ANKARA 000323

SIPDIS

DEPARTMENT ALSO FOR EUR/SE

E.O. 12958: DECL: 02/26/2019
TAGS: OSCE PGOV TU
SUBJECT: TURKEY: CHP ENTERING ELECTION CAMPAIGN RUDDERLESS

Classified By: POL Counselor Daniel O'Grady, for reasons 1.4 (b,d)


1. (C) SUMMARY: As Turkey's local election campaign begins
in earnest, the main opposition Republican People's Party
(CHP) is listless and unimaginative. Unwilling to adapt to a
society less accepting of dogmatic, paternalist ideology, CHP
is going to rely on tactical skirmishes to challenge the
governing Justice and Development Party (AKP). So far, this
ploy is not working. Absent a strategic shift, CHP's success
rests not on its own efforts, but on AKP's failure. END
SUMMARY.


2. (C) The CHP is the party of Turkey's founder, Mustafa
Kemal Ataturk, and is perceived as the bastion of modernity
and secularism in a world -- as perceived by the roughly 15
percent of the population that forms the core of the CHP --
full of the horrors of ethnic separatists, religious
radicals, and backward-looking reactionaries. Nominally a
party of the left, the CHP has been a nationalist entity
closed to creativity and innovation for at least a decade,
and its ideological rigidity has forced it to become entirely
reactive to AKP's popular, creative policies. What
creativity does arise within the party either has to conceal
itself well or risk expulsion, as was the fate of the young
and dynamic Istanbul politician, Mustafa Sarigul (now a
member of the Democratic Left Party, DSP). As a result, the
majority of our contacts, among them some stolid CHP
politicians, say the party has failed to present itself as a
viable alternative to the AKP.

FAILURE TO UNIFY THE LEFT
--------------


3. (C) As the search for candidates began in late 2008, the
press and our contacts were buzzing with the possibility that
the left would unify -- or cooperate, at the very least -- in
the 2009 local elections. But discussions to reach such an
agreement bogged down in the details. CHP, seeing itself as
the natural leader of the left, wanted smaller leftist
parties to come under the CHP name. The smaller parties,
such as the Social-Democratic People's Party (SHP) and the
Democratic Left Party (DSP),feared that being absorbed into
the CHP would dilute their brand and limit their
independence. They preferred that the other leftist parties
abstain from running in municipalities where one party is
especially strong. With no agreement reached on a broad
scale, it is only in Ankara that the leftist parties agreed
to unify their support for Murat Karayalcin, the former SHP
chairman who joined CHP specifically for the elections. With
multiple leftist candidates running in most districts, the
left-wing vote may be splintered enough that the CHP could
lose close races in Izmir and Trabzon and DSP incumbents
could lose cities like Eskisehir and Bartin.

FAILURE TO REACH THE PEOPLE
--------------


4. (C) Despite its claims to represent the Turkish everyman,
the CHP appeals mostly to an ideological intellectual elite
whose role is to protect the state from the irrational and
potentially dangerous demands of the common man. These airs
of superiority make it difficult for CHP's leadership to
communicate with voters outside the cosmopolitan cities and
Aegean coast. Some members of the party confide to us that
the CHP suffers seriously at the polls because of this
approach. Mesut Deger, a CHP MP from Diyarbakir, points to
the debate over the new State-run Kurdish television station,
TRT-6, as a case in point. Instead of embracing the reality
of a multi-cultural Turkey, CHP's leadership reflexively
portrayed the station as the government strengthening ethnic
divisions within the country, giving the impression to voters
that CHP sees Kurdish culture as antithetical to the
interests of Turkey. CHP "missed a big opportunity" in
failing to change its confrontational stance against a wider
acceptance of Kurdishness, Deger says, and effectively ceded
southeastern Turkey to AKP and the pro-Kurdish Democratic
Society Party (DTP). An attempt to seize an opportunity,
however, proved to be just as fruitless as sticking to
ideology. CHP's outreach to pious Muslims -- made in the

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dramatic acceptance of chador-clad women into the party --
was initially viewed with skepticism by a broad band of the
voting public. It also caused a public row within the party,
in which the stalwart secular wing accused Baykal in the
press of betraying the very fundamentals of party ideology.
The whole effort fizzled when the women resigned as a group
from the party, protesting that their preferred candidate for
mayor of Eyyup district of Istanbul was not selected to run.


5. (C) In a February 23 meeting with us, CHP's Sivas
provincial chairman, Bulent Deniz, concurred that the CHP has
played its outreach card badly. He pointed out that the
opposition as a whole has made political missteps, which have
made it difficult to present itself as an alternative to the
AKP. However, he lamented that the CHP doesn't have the
energy of AKP, failing not only in ideological but also in
physical outreach to the people. He is concerned that the
CHP does not use the internet effectively to reach voters.
He also complained that though Prime Minister ERDOGAN has
already held election rallies in Sivas, Adiyaman, and
Diyarbakir, Deniz Baykal had not yet visited a single
province on the campaign trail -- not even Izmir or Trabzon,
traditional CHP strongholds that AKP is threatening to
overturn.

THE POSSIBLE CAMPAIGN TO COME
--------------


6. (C) Despite all the shortcomings and failures to date,
there is nonetheless an occasional glimmer in the darkness
that is CHP's political strategy. In past years, CHP has
been reticent to reach out to the Embassy; recently, we have
received requests for meetings. CHP MP Gaye Erbatur told us
that this is an initiative of the core leadership to better
present CHP to the diplomatic community and to correct
rampant misconceptions that CHP is obstructive and
xenophobic. Baykal also visited European Union officials in
Brussels in early February, presenting a Eurofriendly face in
contrast to his outspoken opposition to much of the AKP's EU
reform program and to Cyprus negotiations. In conversations
with us, Baykal outlined rhetoric that sounded like a
potential campaign speech: in criticizing AKP's lack of
transparency, lack of respect for an independent press, and
alleged corruption, he asked, "Is Turkey closer to Europe
today? Are its social values stronger? Is it more
democratic, or is it becoming something else?"


7. (C) But Baykal failed in his conversations with us to put
any meat on these rhetorical bones. He claimed that the CHP
could not create a new reality, and the current reality is
that the Turkish public sees more success than failure in AKP
policies. AKP has been able to shape public opinion with the
use of the organs of state in a way that CHP cannot. He also
coyly suggested that the West makes his job difficult; when
the EU and the US fail to harshly criticize AKP's excesses,
his party's criticisms are far less likely to gain purchase
with the masses. He and other CHP contacts also doggedly
refuse to define CHP success in any terms other than lack of
success for AKP, with the nation-wide percentage AKP would
need to declare success steadily rising to near 50 percent, a
highly unlikely number even in the best of circumstances.

COMMENT
--------------


8. (C) So far, CHP's campaign has been sluggish and
lackluster, reflecting the result of twenty years of
stifling, uninspiring leadership. If the CHP comes out of
its corner with fiery rhetoric and a tangible program that
would simultaneously co-opt AKP reforms while promising
cleaner, fairer, and more trustworthy implementation, there
might be some resonance among the people. But CHP hasn't
come out of its corner yet, and hasn't committed to even
beginning its campaign in earnest, ceding the early political
ground to AKP. Without laying the ground for the public to
begin to consider them in new light, CHP will have a
difficult time convincing the voters that their campaign
positions are genuine and earnest, meaning that CHP may peak
too late to seriously pose a challenge in the local

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elections. That Deniz Baykal defines his party's success in
terms of AKP "failure" and denies any capability to mold
public opinion is discouraging, since it makes the prospect
of a truly robust democracy in Turkey that much more remote.
So far, it appears unlikely that CHP will wake up to the fact
that it is still on the path to yet another in a long line of
electoral losses.

Visit Ankara's Classified Web Site at
http://www.intelink.sgov.gov/wiki/Portal:Turk ey

Jeffrey