Turkey’s opposition. Time for a change

A farcically out-of-touch party

CONSPIRACY theories blaming the Americans for all that ails Turkey are not new, as Condoleezza Rice, America's secretary of state, may find when she visits Ankara this weekend. But when Deniz Baykal, leader of the opposition Republican People's Party, suggested that the Americans had orchestrated the latest challenge to his 12-year grip, even the crustiest anti-Americans laughed.

Mr Baykal and his party have become objects of ridicule following a special convention to elect a new boss. Mr Baykal defeated Mustafa Sarigul, mayor of Istanbul's rich Sisli district, but only after a two-day slanging match that degenerated into a mob fight. Live television coverage of the melee showed rival supporters hurling chairs at each other. As Mr Baykal listed evidence of his challenger's alleged misdeeds, Mr Sarigul cleaved his way to the lectern to respond, punching a rival mayor on the way. “He also stuck his fingers in my mouth and bit me,” his victim claimed.

The party, better known by its initials CHP, was set up and led by modern Turkey's founding father, Kemal Ataturk, until his death in 1938. It has clung to his legacy, projecting itself, with the generals, as the guarantor of secularism in Turkey. As religiously conservative Anatolians migrated to the cities, the handful of pro-secular ideologues running the CHP remained oblivious to the changes in Turkish society, condemning themselves to political irrelevance.

Weakened by corruption scandals and internal feuds, the CHP failed in 1999 to muster the minimum 10% of the vote that is needed to win seats in parliament. Yet Mr Baykal, who is now 66, managed to hang on. In 2002 the CHP got back in with 19%, but that success looked puny against the 34% won by the mildly Islamist AK party that now governs Turkey. No other party from either left or right was elected to parliament, leaving Mr Baykal as the single-handed opposition to the charismatic prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Last week's fiasco suggests that neither he nor his party is up to the task. With no other credible opposition in sight there is a dangerous political vacuum, which pessimists think can be filled only by the armed forces. Some hope that the European Union might be able to curb Mr Erdogan's occasional blunders, as happened when he tried to criminalise adultery last year. But many would agree that, in the interests of Turkish democracy, it is past time that the CHP reformed itself - and that Mr Baykal stepped down.