BirGün Gazetesi
Yaşar Aydın Three-quarters of the country are dissatisfied with their current situation. At every opportunity, they say, "it cannot go on like this." However, they have not yet found a channel through which to flow. The overwhelming majority of the public believes that the political parties fall short of resolving their problems, and for a long time, the "none of them" party has ranked first in this area. When it comes to party preference, the situation does not change much. One-third of the country still identifies as undecided or states they will not vote. The situation has reached such a point that the words "we are fed up, enough is enough, we have no strength left to endure, they should just go now, let things change" have become the intersection point describing the mood of millions of people in Türkiye. Türkiye is experiencing the most turbulent period in its 103-year Republican history. With minor tremors, the ground beneath the feet of politicians from all segments is shaking. Whether one calls it a "deep wave" or the "harbinger of a major earthquake", the reality at hand is that the country's fault lines have been mobilised. THE PUBLIC HAS SHATTERED THE RULING POWER’S ROUTINE The unrest and the demand for change in the country have reached such a point that there is no longer a chance to manage the situation through familiar political methods. This is precisely why the Erdoğan-Bahçeli duo never drop the opposition from their rhetoric and actions. Both leaders of the People’s Alliance (Cumhur İttifakı) have always been very fond of party-bound politics and opposition. Politics, frozen due to the anti-democratic structure of the electoral and political parties legislation and moving solely on the initiative of leaders, became a facilitating factor for the AKP’s 25-year rule. While Baykal and Kılıçdaroğlu managed the CHP for nearly 30 years, they shared the stage with Erdoğan and Bahçeli throughout this period. The conspiracies within the parties and the changing alliances resulted in Erdoğan extending his political lifespan in every period. Politics in Türkiye turned into a game where the public merely watched the match from the stands. But the situation has now changed. Across the world, the main backbone of the opposition against regimes shaped around authoritarian leaders is no longer political parties, but unified popular forces. Millions uniting around a few highly comprehensible issues and their labour organisations can halt or seriously shake regimes. Türkiye is also one of the countries that has taken its fair share of this situation. Since the Gezi uprising, popular movements have been the ruling power’s ultimate nightmare. Erdoğan and Bahçeli have been unable to adapt to this new state of politics for 15 years. They have constantly expressed their longing for the ‘old days’. This desire lies behind Bahçeli's calls to the opposition to ‘stay away from the streets’ and ‘return to Ankara’, or Erdoğan’s definitions of "national and native". There is no weapon in the ruling power’s ideological, political, or organisational inventory that can be used against an opposition that relies on broad segments of the public and organises around demands rather than names and parties. At this exact juncture, the sword of ‘absolute nullity’ suspended over the CHP and the process of annulling the party congress through the judiciary is the freshest example of that old political inventory so beloved by the ruling power. The People’s Alliance continues to view the opposition merely as an institutional ‘corporation’ consisting of headquarters buildings, delegates, leadership chairs, and articles of association. Activating the judicial mechanism to shut the main opposition party within itself, trapping it in a labyrinth of courtroom corridors, and triggering an artificial leadership crisis is the absolute pinnacle of the familiar political engineering that the ruling power has memorised. The plan is clear: paralyse the institutional body of the opposition with legal shackles, leave it to fret over its own troubles, and thereby leave the social anger on the streets leaderless. NOT PARTY POLITICS, BUT FRONT POLITICS Amid all this confusion, chaos, and fog, the calling of life is very clear. At the helm of the country stands a ruling minority that leans its back on the US and survives through the judiciary and the state bureaucracy. Opposite them are millions who earn the minimum wage, retirees, those facing housing problems, those working under precarious conditions, those whose nature and living spaces are plundered, and those who cannot access justice. They constitute nearly 80 per cent of the country. Despite all interventions and oppression, all these segments of society possess an alliance for ‘change’ that remains unbroken. Moreover, this is not an alliance based solely on electoral arithmetic and established by leaders at a table, like the previously attempted "Nation Alliance" (Millet İttifakı); it stands as an organic front formed within the natural flow of life. Here, the form of relationship that opposition parties and organisations will establish with the "deep wave" emerging in every corner of the country gains critical importance. Will they try to manage the wave, or will they open up space for it and become a part of it? The active answer the opposition gives to this question will yield highly significant consequences in determining the future of the country. THE HOTTEST SUMMER AWAITS US The ruling power begins every new day with a show of force. It attempts the most implausible actions, such as assigning absolute nullity to the CHP. However, the reality missed by the ruling power—the one that shatters its routine—comes to light precisely after these and similar moves. You can lock up the CHP Headquarters through judicial decisions and deem the party congresses ‘null and void’, but you cannot declare the burning reality of the squares, the streets, and the kitchen as an ‘absolute nullity’. The ruling power can terrorise a single leader, shut down a single party, or discredit them in its media. However, it possesses no argument or tool of oppression that it can produce against the collective "cry for a common life" raised by the leaderless woman on the street, the worker in the factory, and the youth left without a future. Today, the opposition in Türkiye has long surpassed the official boundaries of an institutional party and has transformed into a de facto ‘social front’ binding together around concrete demands. You cannot halt the collective cry of the worker, the retiree, and the youth deprived of a future with court decrees. Therefore, ‘taking over’ or paralysing the CHP through traditional methods is no longer enough to save the ruling power. Because what they face is not merely a single party logo that they can bend to their will, but an organic citizen front that transcends parties and spreads in waves. The old inventory of the ruling power is doomed to disintegrate as it hits this new social reality. The coming days will be a very hot summer spoken of not through seals, delegate calculations for party congresses, or judicial decisions, but through the squares and the pursuit of rights. Note: This article is translated from the original article titled İktidarın envanterinde halk muhalefetini yenecek silah yok: Mutlak Butlan Saray’a yetmez, published in BirGün newspaper on June 8, 2026.
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