The reduced sample of Kemal from Dersim

He arrived promising change, but turned out to be a reduced sample of Kemal from Dersim.

After he took the seat of the chairman in the CHP, we attributed his initial stumbles to him being a "newcomer" to the role.

Even though we never approved of his statements that were inconsistent with the principles and philosophy of the republic's founding party, and sometimes even diametrically opposed to them, we said that a leader who is crowned will eventually learn and pull himself together over time.

We overlooked his adolescent behavior, his random phone calls, and his pandering to the hit-men journalists of the palace media.

After all, he had taken the seat of Atatürk, İnönü, and Ecevit.

We thought that he would soon grasp the seriousness and historical importance of being the CHP Chairman, and that if we were to subject him to a barrage of fire right now, we would be unfair by not giving him a chance to come to his senses.

He had been a member of parliament since 2011; even if he hadn't been raised in the CHP's political school, he had managed the party group and had been tempered in politics by witnessing Turkey's most turbulent periods.

Therefore, he should have known that the fact that the country's current circumstances were manifesting in an extremely unfavorable manner placed a very heavy responsibility on him in his capacity as the leader of the main opposition.

He needed to display a strong and uncompromising stance against a government that seemed almost sworn to dismantle the secular, democratic republic, to turn society into an ummah, to make the individual a subject, and in short, to bury the country in the darkness of the Middle Ages.

After toppling Kılıçdaroğlu at the party congress by saying "it is now time for change"—a chairman who, for 13 years, had left the CHP in the hands of a team not at peace with the republic's founding principles, literally emasculating the party, making it right-wing, and giving concession after concession to appease Islamists—we were hoping he would fulfill the requirements of the change he spoke of.

The place this mentality brought the party to was obvious.

Kılıçdaroğlu had almost buried the CHP, which he had severed from its roots, among the dusty pages of history. The party could not exceed the 25 percent band, and a sense of learned helplessness was practically being experienced within the CHP base.

With the change, would the CHP return to its founding settings? Could it be a new hope for the country?

Unfortunately, after taking the CHP chairmanship seat, he began to head toward disappointment at a running pace.

He did not delay in reminding us that he had grown up politically at Kılıçdaroğlu's feet.

To please the soft-brained intellectuals who define themselves as leftists or liberals and who mistake ethnicism, sectarianism, and identity politics for democracy, he first came out and said "equal citizenship."

Is he aware of which mentality's slogan concept this approach is? If he is aware and using it knowingly, then woe to the CHP, woe to the CHP voter...

If he wanted to emphasize that Turkey is increasingly moving away from a state of law, then he needs to go and first learn what the concept of "equality of citizens" means.

It is also clear that he is unaware of where his words "Kurds are less equal," said to wink at the Kurds, are leading.

Connecting the issue to the appointment of trustees and saying that the dismissed mayors were elected with the "votes of the Kurds" is explained by political ignorance, to put it mildly; saying anything more to the chairman of the CHP would not suit us.

In this country, voters do not vote based on their ethnic identities. When everyone in Turkey goes to the ballot box, they vote as a "citizen of the Republic of Turkey." If he wants to see the potential consequences of political behavior shaped by ethnic and sectarian identities, it would be enough for him to look only at Iraq and Lebanon in the Middle East.

He cannot be unaware that the AKP uses the appointment of trustees to municipalities to suppress votes in Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia and to bargain with the Kurds. If he knows, instead of trying to harvest a few votes by winking at the Kurds, why doesn't he explain this dirty blackmail to the voters openly!

However, he made his masterstroke on this subject during a live broadcast he appeared on.

The program host, Candaş Tolga Işık, brought up recent debates and asked, "The DEM Party made a statement in support of Sheikh Said, and the IYI Party submitted a parliamentary question. How do you, as the CHP, view this debate?"

One would have expected a politician who has internalized the founding philosophy of the republic and is not concerned with appeasing this or that by compromising his party's founding principles to give the following answer to this question:

"Sheikh Said is a traitorous insurgent. He is the lead actor in a dirty game staged to tear Mosul away from Turkey; he is a puppet of the British. This rebellion is an attempt to tear apart the young republic through Islamism and Kurdish nationalism. As the founding party of the Republic, this is our clear and unequivocal view of Sheikh Said."

He did not say these things.

Moreover, he didn't even imply them.

With a crushed and embarrassed demeanor inherited as a political legacy from Kılıçdaroğlu, he spoke as if he were apologizing.

He started by saying, "As the CHP, we are respectful to the Republic and the founding cadres of the Republic." He said, "We evaluate that if there are pains experienced in the past period of the Republic, discussing these pains is not the field of hot politics, but the field of historians. We think that constantly turning back and scratching the wounds regarding this matter is of no benefit to anyone."

The host, Candaş Tolga Işık, must not have been satisfied with this answer, as he pressed on, asking, "In your opinion, is Sheikh Said a traitor or a hero?"

The answer to this question was important in terms of showing whether there would really be a paradigm shift in the CHP after Kılıçdaroğlu.

However, the new CHP chairman could not say, "Sheikh Said is a traitor to the homeland," or perhaps he avoided saying it.

Instead, he hemmed and hawed, preferring to kick the ball into touch with the words, "If it will please you for me to say whether Sheikh Said is a traitor or a hero, I know that the Sheikh Said rebellion was an uprising against the Republic in its own conjuncture. But if the problems that arose during the suppression of this uprising hurt the hearts of some grandchildren today, one must be respectful of that pain. But one must learn lessons from history."

It is clear that he has fallen into the concern of appeasing some people, just like his predecessor, in order to receive support in the local elections.

He must be thinking that if he cannot achieve a significant success, his chairmanship will be opened to debate.

Yet, he will lose the bulgur at home while going for rice in Damietta.

Let us end our article by saying that he is unaware that while trying to harvest a few votes from here, he is losing the traditional base of the CHP.