Early life and career
Kılıçdaroğlu was born Kemal Karabulut in the village of Balija in Tunceli, a province in eastern Turkey where the majority of the population is Alevi (an Anatolian Muslim community considered heretical by Turkey’s Sunni majority) and Kurds. Ta. He and his twin brother Adil were the fourth and fifth children respectively in a family of seven. Their father, Kamel, worked in the civil service as a land registrar, and their mother, Yemus, was a housewife. In the 1930s, Kamel and Yemş, both Alevis, witnessed the brutal suppression of an uprising in Tunceli province after the Turkish state tried to force it under military control. In the 1950s, the family changed their surname from Karabulut to Kılıçdaroğlu.
Because of Kamel’s work, the family moved several times during Kemal’s childhood. Nevertheless, he was a learned student. He played the sazzu, a traditional long-necked lute, aspired to become a teacher, and graduated from high school at the top of his class in 1967. He studied economics and finance at the Ankara Academy of Economics and Commercial Sciences (now part of Gazi University), graduating in 1971. He then worked in the Turkish Ministry of Finance. After working for several years, she married Selvi Gunduz, a relative from her hometown, and they raised two daughters and a son.
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Who are the Alevi people of Türkiye?
Within the same ministry, Mr. Kulçdaroğlu became Director General of the Revenue Department in 1983. In 1992, he was appointed director of the Social Insurance Agency (now called the Social Security Agency). He earned a reputation for reliability and attention to detail, and was named “Bureaucrat of the Year” by a Turkish magazine in 1994. He retired from government in 1999 when he was in his early 50s.
career as a politician
Entrance to Parliament Buildings
The year of Mr. Kılıçdaroğlu’s retirement coincided with a pivotal moment in Turkish politics and society. Although the country’s security stabilized after a period of political violence and Kurdish rebellion, the military continued to assert undue influence over public policy. Turkey’s debt- and inflation-stricken economy is undergoing rapid liberalization, benefiting conservative Anatolia’s growing middle class at the expense of secular urban elites in Turkey’s financial and business capitals. brought about. Meanwhile, years of government mismanagement and corruption culminated in 1999 due to inadequate preparations for the Izmit earthquake, causing massive destruction and loss of life.
Mr Kulçdaroğlu had ideas for reform and was aiming to enter politics, but he was not included in the list of the ruling Democratic Left Party (DLP). However, after the 2001 financial crisis, his experience at high government levels and his writings calling for the restructuring of the economy and bureaucracy made him an attractive candidate for the Republican People’s Party (CHP), which asked him to cooperate in parliamentary elections. It was done. 2002 Election.
After the election, Kulçdaroğlu changed his political affiliation and became a member of parliament. The support of the mainstream parties of the 1980s and 1990s has collapsed and they are no longer able to meet electoral standards. The CHP was founded by founding father Kemal Atatürk, but was re-formed as a minority party in 1992 and was one of only two parties to enter parliament. Although the CHP had made overtures to bring reformers like Mr. Kılıçdaroğlu into the party, it remained dominated by the same Kemalist political class responsible for decades of misgovernment. Additionally, at a time when Turkish women wearing the Islamic head covering (hijab) were prevented from attending universities and entering other public spaces, the CHP demonstrated a firm commitment to secularism and did not offer any solutions to reconcile the disenfranchisement of women that was affecting them. The party came in second place, far behind the newly formed Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP), which promised to enact policies to further liberalize both the economy and Turkish society.
Leadership of the Republican People’s Party (CHP)
Mr. Kulçdaroğlu rose through the ranks of the CHP in the 1990s, but the party remained in the opposition as it maintained both an outdated platform and outdated leadership. The AKP government, under the leadership of the charismatic Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, remained a powerful force for popular change. In the 2000s, the economy was not only stable, but booming. Foreign investment and tourism were the driving force behind the expansion, as the government sought improved relations with the European Union. In 2008, the ban on hijab on university campuses was lifted, and in 2010 constitutional reforms strengthened democratic standards (while also increasing the military’s responsibility for government oversight). The situation worsened in the same year when the CHP leadership was forced to resign amid scandal. Just a few days later, Mr. Kılıçdaroğlu, who ran unsuccessfully in the Istanbul mayoral election the year before, ran unopposed for the party leadership.
Under Kılıçdaroğlu, the CHP moved away from its nationalist position and toward a more liberal, reform-oriented leadership. The day after he was elected leader, party delegates replaced many of the aging guards with younger members. In the years that followed, some former conservatives argued that Kurdochdaroğlu had diluted the CHP’s values and that controversial members (for example Kurdish activists and unionists in 2011 leader) into the party.
Opening up the party to different backgrounds, perspectives, and lifestyles became a defining element of Mr. Kılıçdaroğlu’s leadership, which he eventually described as Heraleshme (Turkish: “reconciliation”, literally “halalization”) did. One of the most visible changes has been the deep-rooted issue of women’s head coverings, which Prime Minister Kulçdaroğlu said in July 2020: Why do you care about scarves? Let women wear what they want to wear. ” Later that month, delegates elected the first hijab-wearing woman to the party’s parliament.
But although Mr. Kulçdaroğlu was an overall reformer, he was by no means a pioneer. Although the CHP expanded its positions on important issues, it largely remained within mainstream political norms. Despite his efforts to increase inclusion, more than 3.5 million Syrian refugees remain stranded in the country, which he characterized as a burden to both the economy and society. In May 2016, he sponsored a bill to lift parliamentarians’ immunity from arrest and prosecution, paving the way for an emboldened AKP to arrest more than a dozen Kurdish parliamentarians later that year. . When CHP parliamentarians were detained in July 2017, Mr. Kılıçdaroğlu led a 25-day protest march from Ankara to Istanbul. He was praised for confronting the government’s drift toward authoritarianism, but offered little explanation for not opposing the bill when it was introduced in parliament.
2023 presidential election
While the CHP shed its old guard under Kılıçdaroğlu, the AKP became increasingly focused on preserving Erdoğan’s regime. Economic prosperity in the 2000s gave the AKP almost unrivaled popularity, but in the early 2010s the party began to establish itself and subdue opposition. After an attempted coup in July 2016 that led to the arrests of opponents and the censorship of critics, the country took a decidedly authoritarian turn. A constitutional referendum in 2017 abolished the office of prime minister and gave new powers to the office of president, which were significantly strengthened when Mr. Erdoğan was reelected as prime minister in 2018. The appointment of Mr. Erdoğan’s son-in-law to head the Ministry of Finance shocked the nation. While Erdogan struggled with the central bank, the already fragile economy triggered a recession and years of high inflation. In 2021, he sparked controversy over violations of academic freedom, and in 2022 he enacted a vague law banning the dissemination of disinformation that effectively allowed the AKP to target media outlets and public officials. The first high-profile charges under the False Information Act were filed against Mr. Kulçdaroğlu in November 2022, but no action was taken against him.
By early 2023, Mr. Kılıçdaroğlu had consolidated the joint support of six opposition parties, known as the Table of Six or National Union, as a unified candidate to challenge Erdoğan in the next election. Additionally, the largest party representing the country’s sizable Kurdish minority, the People’s Democratic Party (HDP), chose not to field a candidate, and in the weeks before the election, the People’s Democratic Party (HDP) chose not to field a candidate. He called on people to vote for Kurdoçdaroğlu. . Mr. Kulçdaroğlu was not considered a particularly attractive candidate, but the National Alliance believes his bureaucratic background and down-to-earth persona will appeal to voters against the persistent agitation of his opponents. I was expecting it. One Turkish academic explained the situation to the New York Times as follows: “This is not an election to open the gates of heaven. It is an election to close the gates of hell.”
The February 2023 earthquake near the city of Gaziantep served as a stark reminder of the dangers of elections. Almost a quarter of a century after the Izmit earthquake, government mismanagement and corruption have prevented compliance with building codes. By May’s voting day, more than 50,000 people had died in Turkey from the February earthquake and its aftermath (thousands more in neighboring Syria), making the disaster deadlier than the 1999 earthquake. Ta. About one-seventh of Turkey’s registered voters lived in areas affected by February’s earthquake, but only a fraction of the millions of displaced voters who met the deadline to register to vote outside their hometowns It was.
Despite this, voter turnout was close to 90 percent, and Kulçdaroğlu came in second place with about 45 percent of the votes. For the first time, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan received less than a majority of votes, forcing him to face Mr. Kılçdaroğlu in a historic run-off election scheduled for May 28.
