The party is not just poor in its ideology, but also in its cadres. As everybody knows, Mr. Baykal is their leader not because he is successful, but because he is the best alternative among the others. And from the performance of Baykal, you can extrapolate how awful the others would be. The 70-year-old leader has nothing but fear to offer. Every time I see him on TV, he, with an angry tone and a stern face, he explains the threats Turkey faces and how his party stands against them. In the last decade, I really can’t recall any comprehensive plan or project that he has offered for solving Turkey’s real problems. He occasionally engages in some face saving efforts such as his current trip to the Southeast, but he never takes a credible stance. That’s why even the people who vote for CHP don’t believe that it would form a good government. Most of them vote because they buy the fear that Mr. Baykal sells.

The rise and fall of ‘Turkish Watergate’

Recently the CHP created a scandal that embarrassed most of their sympathizers. The affair, prematurely dubbed as “the Turkish Watergate,” started when the Islamist daily Vakit published the transcripts of a private conversation between CHP’s Secretary General Önder Sav and a former governor. Mr. Sav claimed his party’s headquarters had been bugged, and he and Mr. Baykal rushed to accuse the government and the “Islamist gang within the police” for illegal eavesdropping.Soon, it all turned out to be hogwash. What really happened was that a Vakit reporter called Mr. Sav on his cell phone on that specific day, and the reckless politician unknowingly kept the phone line open for 44 minutes while talking to his guest.

So, “the Turkish Watergate” that the CHP made up, and many believed in, turned out to be a fiasco, but neither Mr. Baykal nor Mr. Sav apologized. And they are still unabashedly unrepentant. Don’t be surprised if they show up soon with a new fancy theory about how they, and “the Republic”, are being targeted by the government, the Islamists, the Christians, the EU, the US, “global capitalism” and anything you can imagine. The CHP, after all, is a party of fear.

In other words, it is a disaster. And many people, who have already figured that out, are just wondering why. This is the party founded by no one other than Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, they think, who had pushed Turkey towards modernization. Kemalism, the reasoning goes, was determined to make Turkey a Western-style democracy. How could such a good start come to such a bad end?

Of course, there is a presumption here: that the genesis of the CHP was good. Yet it is flatly wrong. Actually when we look at the CHP of the 1930’s, we see that all the sources of today’s illiberalism were well-seated there. The ideology CHP gurus have formulated in the late 30’s was based on the “Six Arrows”: secularism, nationalism, statism, republicanism, populism, and revolutionism. Neither democracy nor liberty was among them. In fact, Recep Peker, the long-time Secretary General of the CHP, had formulated these Six Arrows precisely as a counter-force to liberalism, which was a powerful ideology among the late Ottoman and early Republican intellectuals.

So, we would be wrong if we blamed Mr. Baykal for betraying his tradition. He has actually restored that tradition after the social democratic “deviation” the party had experienced during the leaderships of Bülent Ecevit, Hikmet Çetin and Altan Öymen.

In fact, saying that Kemalism was a great idea but the CHP betrayed it is a bit like arguing that Marxism was a great idea, but all those late-comers (Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc.) corrupted it. If you have an intellectual crush on Mr. Marx, you can of course believe in that. But as many prominent thinkers, from Karl Popper to Friedrich Hayek, have demonstrated, the problem was in not just the implementation of Marxism, but also in its very core principles.

The core principle, and the main flaw of Kemalism was that it was an authoritarian ideology as captured in its famous motto: “For the people, in spite of the people.” Once you accept that, you really can never be a democrat or a liberal. You will always think that people are not smart enough to get your ideals, which are absolute truths, so you have to impose them on society by state power. Therefore the CHP can never be a social democratic — or any sort of democratic — party unless it denounces this authoritarian tradition.

Already in power

That fact will also help us understand why the CHP never seriously tries to come to power. As well known, Mr. Baykal is just happy with what he is: a fierce opposition leader who blocks all efforts toward democratic reform. People often wonder why that is the case, and ask, “but aren’t parties formed in order to come to power?”

Well, the CHP is already in power. Its ideology is shared by the powerful institutions, such as the judiciary and the military, which rule the Turkish political system. So, in order to keep itself in power, the only thing the CHP has to do is to make sure that the autocratic dominance of these institutions is assured. Therefore, unlike other parties which try to compete with each other in the democratic system, the CHP is focused on containing the democratic system. The less democracy we have, the better off the CHP is.

In Turkey people often force Prime Minister Erdoğan to denounce Islamism, which he did many times. But I have never heard Mr. Baykal denouncing the for-the-people-in-spite-of-the-people logic. That is why his party is a disaster — and it just looks hopeless.