July 24, 2007	Tuesday	Rajab 08, 1428

ANKARA: Turkey’s oldest political party was the big loser in Sunday's elections, failing to capitalise on a pro-secular mass movement that had the ruling party against the ropes only two months ago.

Unofficial results on Monday showed the Republican People's Party (CHP), created in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the modern Turkish republic, obtained 20.8 per cent of the popular vote to win 110 seats in the 550-member parliament.

Although a slight improvement on its 2002 showing of 19.4 per cent, the CHP was swept away by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP), which improved its vote share by more than 12 points to 46.4 per cent and 340 seats.

And this despite a much-heralded electoral alliance with a small left of centre group, the Democratic Left Party, which got all of the its 13 members elected.

Most of the blame went on party leader Deniz Baykal, 70, a former academic who rules with an iron fist and has been severely criticised over the years for moving farther to the right while ignoring intra-party democracy.

The atmosphere was tense on Sunday night outside the CHP's modernistic suburban headquarters when Secretary-General Onder Sav stepped to the microphone to comment on the election results.

As he spoke live on television, fistfights and shouting matches erupted between party members demanding Baykal's resignation and those still faithful to the veteran leader.

“We did not lose the election — we simply did not win it,” Sav said, but the words rang hollow to many of the party faithful.

On Monday, the national media were near unanimous in calling for the resignations of Baykal and his team, who have lost four consecutive elections since 1995.

“This is the end for Baykal. He must go,” was the terse message from a columnist in the popular daily Vatan.

He accused the leader and his “politburo” — a handful of trusted aides — of having offered no solutions to Turkey's problems in their years at the helm of the CHP, presenting themselves only as the standard bearers of secularism.

By Monday afternoon, Baykal had still not commented on the election.

Rarely had the hopes of CHP followers been so high as before Sunday's vote.

Everyone expected the party to capitalise on the massive, unprecedented pro-secular rallies sparked in April and May by the AKP's unsuccessful bid to have its own candidate, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul elected president.

Gul is Erdogan's closest comrade in arms and, like him, a former Islamist whose wife wears headscarf — traits that made him unacceptable for secularists to occupy the largely ceremonial but symbolically charged presidency.

The Turkish army — greatly respected despite its record of toppling four governments in as many decades — stepped in with a threat to intervene if it felt secular principles were menaced.

For many defenders of secularism who still mistrust the AKP's Islamist past — despite Erdogan's repeated assurances — the CHP was the only viable alternative and it appeared to have the ruling party on the run with week after week of mass public rallies.

“The CHP tried to corner us with nationalist rhetoric, but it backfired,” said Ertugrul Gunay, a former CHP leader who was elected to parliament on Sunday on an AKP ticket.

“Deniz Baykal simply shot himself in the foot,” the veteran politician said.

“The CHP failed to make the transition from its republican, state-centred tradition to becoming a truly democratic party,” commented Nilufer Gole, a respected sociologist and an expert on Muslim society.

“It failed to live up to Turkish society's expectations of modernisation,” she said.

Baykal estranged his traditional leftist electorate with an increasingly nationalistic tone in dealing with the Kurdish problem, non-Muslim minorities and the European Union, to the point that some branded his version of the CHP a “fascist” party.Abandoning the values of the left and lacking an ideology to replace it with is what led to the party's downfall, columnist Hasan Bulent Kahraman wrote Monday in the mass-selling daily Sabah.

“The biggest loser of the election is the CHP,” he wrote, “and the responsibility for this stunning defeat falls squarely on Baykal.”—AFP