One day in late May, 2010, I dropped by the Ankara office building of Turkey’s largest opposition party, the venerable Republican People’s Party (CHP). News had broken the previous day that the party’s longtime leader, who had resigned amid a sex scandal, had been replaced by a new and largely unknown figure from the depths of Turkey’s civil service.
I soon found myself in a small office dominated by a portrait of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey and of the secularist CHP. Sitting across a desk was a bespectacled man whose quiet manner and kindly bearing resembled not so much a national leadership candidate as the candidate’s accountant.
It was Kemal Kilicdaroglu’s first full day as opposition leader. Over the next hour he calmly laid out a program, sometimes specific but often vague, that he has largely stuck to for 13 years.
On Sunday, depending on the result of a tumultuous election, Mr. Kilicdaroglu stands a good chance of becoming Turkey’s next president – an accomplishment that would end 20 years of rule by the increasingly authoritarian Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP).
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Much has changed in Turkey during those 13 years, mostly for the worse. Mr. Kilicdaroglu, by all accounts, remains a changeless, largely opaque presence. Nobody really knows how he might govern – especially since he leads a six-party coalition, the Nation Alliance, that brings together right-wing nationalists, Islamists, former Erdogan deputies and secular social democrats such as the CHP.
“We will tell people how a political outrage happened during the AKP period,” he told me in 2010. “We will also tell people that … Erdogan, who used to be proud of being poor, is now one of the richest prime ministers in the world. They keep talking about freedoms, but even the citizens on the street are afraid to talk on their phones. They’re afraid to criticize the government, because the next day they text people and knock on their doors. Media is under huge pressure, and now they’re trying to control the judiciary. So the picture is one of a fear empire – we need to break this up.”
This was prescient.
His party has fought and lost four national elections as Mr. Erdogan has changed the constitution to disempower democratic institutions, turned courts into instruments of his will, crushed protest movements, seized control of most national media and imprisoned critics and journalists. In 2017, Mr. Erdogan used a questionable referendum to shift Turkey from a parliamentary to a presidential form of government.
In 2010, Mr. Kilicdaroglu’s fear was that Mr. Erdogan had a hidden Islamist agenda. That turned out not to be a significant threat (except at the symbolic level – for example, by rather tastelessly turning Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia cathedral into a mosque). Instead, Mr. Erdogan had a hidden Putin-inspired agenda of lifetime rule.
Today, Mr. Kilicdaroglu’s coalition promises, above all else, to end the economic mismanagement that has plunged Turkey into a crisis of hyperinflation, and to reverse the constitutional changes and restore democratic institutions. It is not at all clear how it will accomplish that, but the spirit of democracy would be welcome.
Equally welcome are his pledges, which he hinted at in 2010, to restore a normal liberal economy and restart accession talks with the European Union – a sharp break from the historic stand of his party, which during the 2000s was economically nationalist and isolationist and anti-Europe, allowing Mr. Erdogan to play the role of a Westernizing reformer.
In terms of Turkey’s relations with the wider world, it’s not clear how much would change. “Foreign policy has to be played like a chess master – it has to be made considering three or four moves ahead,” Mr. Kilicdaroglu told me during our meeting. “We believe, we know, that double standards are being applied to Turkey in international politics.”
To be specific, he has pledged this year to make peace with Syria’s mass-murdering dictator Bashar al-Assad, reversing a dozen years of Turkish participation in the battle against him, and to forcibly repatriate hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees. He would keep playing Russia and the West against each other. He does not appear to be serious about resolving decades-old conflicts over Cyprus, Armenia or Mediterranean borders.
And I got a dismissive answer, similar to ones he gives today, when I asked him if he’d build unity as Turkey’s first leader from an ethnic and religious minority – his background is Alevi, a Shiite sect which, like the larger Kurdish minority, is often mistreated. “I don’t think it should really matter whether I’m Alevi, Sunni or anything else,” he told me. “My political approach is one in which the beliefs and origins like ethnicity are not emphasized, but a human-based politics.”
That, like much of his agenda, would not mark a big change. For the moment, however, only one thing matters: He is the candidate who stands a good chance of ending Mr. Erdogan’s 20-year decline into tyranny.
Doug Saunders