Solving CHP puzzle in new era: Özel, İmamoğlu, Yavaş all emboldened

amount to a grassroots alliance? I would argue that the CHP should not assume that it successfully formed a grassroots alliance.

The Türkiye Alliance, which CHP members describe as a “grassroots-level unity of social democrats, liberals, conservatives, Kurds and nationalists” will face serious challenges over the next months and years. Indeed, most challenges will come from the YSP as it seeks to carve out ideological and political space for itself.

The CHP is compelled to clarify its ambiguous and currently empty rhetoric, which replaced the “table for six” alliance, and keep appealing to Kurdish nationalists, Turkish nationalists and leftists simultaneously. If the AK Party manages to reconnect with disgruntled conservatives, it will not be enough for the CHP to use some religious symbols.

The CHP may be undergoing a learning process and change. Yet will it be able to keep its hardliners, who will make additional demands based on their party’s success, under control?

CHP’S LOCAL GOVERNANCE

One of the points that the CHP chairperson made – with which I disagree – was that the voters had “warmed up to the CHP’s pro-people brand of local government.” After all, CHP-affiliated mayors seem to lack experience in effective public service, notwithstanding some social municipalism and public relations methods that they learned from the AK Party. Indeed, the electorate focused on economic challenges, rather than the performance of CHP-controlled municipalities, on election day.

The difficult question to answer is as follows: What kind of party will the CHP become as Özel, İmamoğlu and Mansur Yavaş become more powerful simultaneously? The mayors of Istanbul and Ankara bring about a new kind of CHP.

Will the CHP’s ideological base and organization view that the CHP as the true CHP? And will the CHP be able to answer such questions while shouldering the burden of the YSP’s potentially ambitious political agenda?