Turkey’s Opposition Faces Leadership Crisis After Protests
The winds of hope raised by Kemal Dervis’ entry into politics in 2002 and those raised by the Gezi Park protesters looked alike from the surface, and they may share the same fate in the end.
What do you think about comparing the winds of hope raised by Kemal Dervis prior to the November 2002 elections and those of the Gezi Park protests, and paying attention to the lesson learned back then? Let me explain what I am talking about:
When the late Ismail Cem, one of Turkey’s former foreign ministers, founded the New Turkey Party (YTP) in July 2002, splitting from the Democratic Left Party (DSP) with a group of his close friends, there was an assumption that Kemal Dervis would join them. That speculation got crowds excited. Many thought that with Dervis joining the YTP, Cem’s victory in the November 2002 election would be guaranteed.
Dervis was considered a folk hero at the time because his rescue plan worked to bring the gravely sinking economy together after the last big economic crisis of February 2001 that crashed the markets overnight. Dervis symbolized back then the wind of hope for a new beginning, but his unexpected decision to turn his back on Cem — quite late in the game before the elections, and instead join the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the winds for YTP went flat, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), founded in August 2001, won the elections.
People simply wanted to teach the old-time mainstream political parties a lesson then for failing to create economic stability and go with something not tried. That was the people’s call for democracy — just like the protests triggered by efforts to save Gezi Park in downtown Istanbul. Like Dervis though, it seems likely that the opposition parties are going to dissipate this new wind of hope, too.
