'Does the CHP have the competent staff and capacity to govern the country?'

Even its own natural voter base cannot answer this question with peace of mind with a “yes.”

Let's get straight to the point without any fluff.

The CHP achieved an unexpectedly high vote share in the March 31 local elections and became Turkey's leading party.

It achieved a major political victory by winning 14 metropolitan municipalities, including Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Adana, and Bursa, as well as 21 provinces and 337 district municipalities.

This was credited to Özgür Özel, who broke Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu's 13-year hegemony and took the seat of Chairman at the party congress held last November.

The voter extended political credit to him.

The CHP did not achieve this success due to Özgür Özel's magnificent charisma, powerful oratory, reassuring leadership, mastery of politics, or genius for strategy.

Frankly, the voters, who had become thoroughly fed up with the 22-year AKP government and, especially in the last year, were forced to live almost at the hunger threshold, stamped their ballots for candidates they deemed reasonable without splitting hairs too much.

Let us open a brief parenthesis here and emphasize that a portion of the CHP candidates came from right-leaning, nationalist, and idealist traditions.

One way or another, the resulting political landscape brought with it a very important opportunity to get rid of the political Islamist mentality that has been weighing on Turkey like a nightmare for 22 years.

This needed to be evaluated very well.

However, in the approximately one month that has passed since the local elections, Özgür Özel has failed to take action to move Turkey out of this anomalous period in republican history by building a strong strategy on this success of the CHP.

While he was playing for time with general, passing statements about daily politics, we suddenly saw him preparing to appear before the AKP President at the Palace and fall into line with his agenda.

We do not know if he is aware that he will be politically ruined by the circulation of a photo taken while he stood in a submissive posture before Tayyip, but he is trying to sell this to the people of our country with sentences to the effect of, “we are doing both negotiation and struggle in politics.”

He has not yet brought those who voted for him to the point of saying, “I wish my hand had been broken...” However, it is a fact that he has created serious question marks in the minds of the CHP's traditional voters, Atatürkists, and republicans.

He does not know, or does not want to know, that the political conjuncture in Turkey will change rapidly.

What happens if the voter withdraws the support they gave on March 31?

In other words, what kind of political picture would emerge “if there were an election today...”

Does this give us an idea about a possible early election or 2028?

It is possible to multiply the questions.

Let's get to the point...

The Turkey Political Situation Research conducted by AREA between April 20-22 with 3,062 people over the age of 18 in 26 provinces and 92 districts has remarkable results.

The research is extremely fresh!

Although the psychological effect on the voter of Tayyip lining up political party leaders, especially Özgür Özel, before him like a row of glasses at the April 23 reception in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey has not been measured, important data has still been obtained.

First, they were asked who they would vote for if there were an election today.

34.4 percent of the participants answered CHP.

The rate of those saying AKP remained at 32.5 percent.

This is a rate below the vote it received when it came to power in 2002.

The data was then compared with the valid votes in the May 14 general elections.

The research shows that the CHP has increased its votes by 9 percent, while the AKP has lost 3.1 percent of its votes.

In other words, even if the people of our country stand a few steps back compared to the local elections, they continue their support for the CHP.

It would not be wrong to say that if there were a general election today, the CHP would be close to power as the leading party.

Under normal conditions, in a normal country, it is expected that the voter will vote for the party that has the staff they believe will govern the country well, and that they will trust the staff of the party they support in parallel with the political credit they have opened.

However, this is exactly where the problem lies for Turkey!

In the research conducted, a complete parallel did not emerge between the political behavior of the mass that should be the CHP's natural voter base and their trust in the party staff.

The pollsters asked, “Do you think the CHP has the competent staff and capacity to govern the country?”

Half of the participants answered this question with “no”!

This is understandable. Because this 50 percent also includes AKP supporters and MHP supporters...

But 30.3 percent of those who define themselves as “Atatürkist,” 33.3 percent of those who define themselves as “social democrat,” and 63.4 percent of those who define themselves as Turkish Nationalist said they did not believe that the CHP had the competent staff to govern the country.

The data that emerged is important because these two segments—that is, the urban, secular section of Atatürkists, social democrats, and Turkish nationalists who have not followed the AKP—form the main body of the CHP's voter base.

This means there is a trust issue between the CHP's management staff and this body.

This rate rises to 48 percent among the educated segment of the electorate, that is, university graduates, regardless of political view or party affiliation.

Interestingly, one in every five voters who voted for CHP candidates in the local elections and cast their ballot for Kılıçdaroğlu in 2023 shares the same view!

11 percent have no opinion at all.

Yet, the people who carried the CHP, which had refreshed its strength at the Congress, to first place in the local elections should have stood behind the party staff as a united front.

Even 14.3 percent of voters who directly say “I am a CHP member” think that the CHP cannot govern the country with its current staff.

It is a situation that literally falls into the field of study of political psychology, but in simple terms, the research result shows that the team holding the reins in the CHP, especially Özgür Özel, has not been able to instill much confidence in the people of our country.

It is clear that this is support given out of a sense of duty to get rid of the AKP.

Even if we set aside Özgür Özel's behavior like an adolescent seeking attention and approval, his political wavering, and his constant shooting from the hip to stay on the agenda, it would be naive, to say the least, to expect such trust to emerge in the voter when we line up the contradictory and nonsensical statements made by the CHP's authorized and influential figures over the last month, and with that, let us conclude our article.