The hopeless and fragmented opposition in Turkey finally closed ranks last year and defeated the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in local elections in several major cities.
Istanbul's new popular mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu, has received the most attention and credit.
However, few in the international media have noticed the woman behind him - the motorcycle-riding leftist, LGBTQ-supporting feminist Canan Kaftandioglu, head of the Republican People's Party (CHP) in Istanbul.
However, it did not go unnoticed by supporters and critics in Turkey.
Kaftandzioglu is widely recognized at home as someone who played a key role in her party's success in the fight against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
She is both a public iconoclast and a tireless behind-the-scenes worker - and at 48, a symbol of generational change in a party traditionally dominated by older people.
Her political style is an implicit rejection of the nationalist faction of her own party, which is strongly devoted to the founder of the republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, but many associate her with hostility towards minorities and openly devout Muslims.
Kaftandzioglu does not apologize for opposing the mentality that once dominated the decision-making process in the party, and which is now widely considered to be outdated.
That bold thinking, which she later channeled into a conciliatory new electoral strategy, fueled the CHP's steady growth. It also made her the target of Erdogan's wrath.
Kaftandzioglu grew up in the 1970s and 1980s in the countryside of Turkey's Ordu province along the Black Sea. Her mother was a housewife and her father a teacher, and they lived modestly.
"I am one of the hundreds of thousands of Turks who were born in the countryside, grew up in poverty, but I became what I am thanks to the equal opportunities provided by the republic," she wrote in response to "Forin Polisija" questions.
She attended medical school in Istanbul and specialized in forensic medicine.
However, during her studies, she became involved in politics, defending the rights of women who wear headscarves, who were banned from attending some universities, and writing theses about cases of torture, which were widespread in Turkey at the time.
She later dedicated herself to activism, first with the Turkish Human Rights Foundation and later as one of the founders of the Collective Memory program with families of victims of unsolved political murders.
Her father-in-law Umit Kaftandzioglu, a writer and columnist for the secular daily "Jumhuriyet", was killed in 1980 in front of his house in Istanbul. It is suspected that he was killed by ultranationalists.
“She is as much an activist as a politician. Her work in civic activism is so significant and revolutionary,” says Aykan Erdemir, director of the Turkey program of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C., and a former CHP member of parliament.
"She's almost like the exact opposite of the stereotypical CHP associated with the old era."
In 2011, Kaftandzioglu started working for the CHP in Istanbul as the head of media, culture and communications, then in 2012 she became the deputy leader for Istanbul, and in 2018 she became the head of the party in that city. Experience with ordinary people always permeates her activism in the CHP.
Since she came to head the party in Istanbul in 2018, she has invested energy in allying with other opposition parties, mobilizing young professionals and developing a new approach to win over segments of the population that the party had previously often ignored.
"The CHP's earlier approach, which a number of people still hold, is that they have the right ideas, and if the people don't understand them, that's the people's problem," said Ilter Turan, a professor of political science at Bilgi University in Istanbul. "I think that Canan Kaftancioglu represents another, truly democratic approach, where you can go out and convince people that you have the right ideas."
A strategy to reduce divisions
Under her leadership, Imamoglu and other mayors have adopted a new tactic, called the "radical love" strategy, which is the antithesis of Erdogan's cruel style of divisiveness and antagonism.
This has included reaching out to marginalized groups, using positive, inclusive rhetoric (which is extremely rare in the cutthroat world of Turkish politics) and attempts to reduce the cultural divides that Erdogan is deepening. Imamoglu's positive slogan was "Everything will be fine" and he said a prayer at a mosque - a rare move for a CHP politician - to reach out to devout Muslims.
The party has shown it cares about government supporters frustrated by Turkey's economic woes, minorities wary of the CHP's nationalist wing, and religious conservatives who often see the secularist CHP as Islamophobic.
"They appeared as someone who does not cause conflicts and divisions. They actually tried to reach out to population groups that regular CHP members would believe did not belong in their constituencies,” says Turan.
Additionally, in stark contrast to the major communications and technical failures during the 2018 presidential election, under the watchful eye of Kaftandgioglu and others, the election day strategy for last year's local elections - which included a controversial repeat after it emerged that the CHP had narrowly won in the first round - it was applied very disciplinedly.
Imamoglu was constantly on television and communicated clearly, and for fear of election fraud, the party was on duty to protect the counting of votes.
"This is the first time I've seen the CHP organized like that," says Nevshin Mengu, a columnist and supporter of the party. "Kaftandzioglu played an important role there."
The perfect bogeyman
The Turkish oppositionist is a popular, but also controversial figure. She expressed views that are extremely controversial within the party and the state. She acknowledged the genocide of the Armenians and called the state a "serial killer", she criticized the popular Kemalist slogan for its militant tone and announced on Twitter: "I refuse to say that we are Mustafa Kemal's soldiers, we are his comrades."
Such attitudes made her the perfect bogeyman for the religious-conservative, nationalist AKP.
Within 48 hours of her election as Istanbul head of the party, prosecutors opened an investigation against her on terrorism charges (she is now appealing a XNUMX-year prison sentence), and Erdogan personally devoted ten minutes to criticizing her at an AKP meeting the next day. account, reading every one of her Twitter posts that bothered him.
More recently, a policewoman was charged and investigated after the CHP in Istanbul reported Erdogan's powerful communications director Fahrettin Altun for allegedly building illegally in the city.
It is part of a wider hostile government strategy that sees anyone in the opposition as an existential threat.
After municipalities where the CHP is in power began a campaign to collect donations to help those affected by the coronavirus pandemic, the central government blocked those funds and accused the party of trying to establish a parallel state.
"The government, in accordance with its usual political mentality, is managing the crisis without transparency, cooperation or common sense," Kaftandzioglu said.
Because she is a woman, she is even more of a target for detractors. "I receive hundreds of threats from sexist, nationalist and ultra-religious groups. I knew that as a woman I would face this, but I never thought about backing down," Kaftandziogu wrote in an email.
She said the government has a strategy to polarize society along cultural and political fault lines and find enemies everywhere.
“If a government cannot identify an external enemy, it creates abstract enemies and pretends to be at war with them. Sometimes he says it's foreign powers, sometimes it's terrorism, and sometimes it's secular people.” Selim Koru, an analyst at Turkey's Economic Policy Research Foundation, an Ankara-based nonprofit, says Erdogan needs "credible enemies" to unite his party and supporters against them through his polarizing tirades. In many ways, Džanan fits perfectly into that role, not only because of his political views, but also because of his lifestyle. She once tweeted a photo of her husband eating pork, a major red line in Turkey, even among most secular citizens.
Absence of national spirit
"What really makes it a juicy target is its flagrant absence of national spirit 'yerli ve milli' (local and national, the government's favorite phrase). She and the people around her... not only live outside the context of the national spirit, but also deny that kind of nationalism,” says Koru.
"Erdogan can stand up and say 'Look, this is deliberate disrespect. She hates you, she hates what you represent and she wants to change you the way the Kemalists wanted to change you, in the worst possible way.'”
Due to her views, the oppositionist has become a controversial figure in her own party, especially among the older generations.
“They hate her. They absolutely hate her. They see her as an evil woman who came here to divide the CHP. For them, this change is terrible. They think the CHP is falling apart. But no, the party is changing.”
However, as political scientist Turan points out, just as Dzhanana's approach repels many people, it also attracts others who may have felt excluded until now, such as the youth, leftists, liberals and religious and ethnic minorities.
“One part of the party does not like her iconoclastic approach to politics. However, it may be the case that some other people, who previously felt alienated from the party, are now more interested for the same reason.”
"As if I won"
Women in particular seem to be inspired by the fact that a female politician has achieved such success. Nevshib Mengu attended the CHP congress when Kaftandzioglu was re-elected.
“There was excitement. At least half the room was filled with women," she said. One of them told her: "Every time she wins, I feel like I won."
The slogan of the congress was "from Istanbul to Turkey, the only way forward is by coming to power", indicating that the CHP has increasing ambitions to win at the national level. The party has not won an election since 1977, but its most popular figure, Imamoglu, is doing nearly as well as Erdogan in the polls.
It is too early for the party to announce a presidential candidate, but the favorites are likely to be Imamoglu or Mansur Javas, the popular mayor of the capital Ankara. Çanan Kaftançioğlu is likely to continue his role as an actor behind the scenes.
Elections in Turkey are held under incredibly unfair conditions that favor the ruling party. Some experts no longer consider the country a democracy, but a competitive authoritarian system, especially after there were few restrictions left on Erdogan's rule when the system was transformed into "executive presidential" after the 2017 referendum. Kaftandzioglu describes it as "one-party rule turned into one-man rule." ".
Erdogan will do everything to stay in power
It is anyone's guess whether Erdogan will relinquish power even if he loses the next presidential election, scheduled for 2023.
"The question is, will the current president be willing to give up that important position? And the answer is that, of course, he will be extremely reluctant to do so and will do everything in his power to undermine the electoral process in order to stay in power," says political scientist Ilter Turan, stressing that this may not be the case if the rival wins. by a large enough margin.
In any case, as columnist Nevšin Mengu points out, in the until recently hopeless opposition circles, great hope has reawakened. "For the first time in a long time, people are talking about the CHP as if it has a real chance of winning the national elections."
The article was published in the magazine "Forin Polisi" Translated and edited by: Angelina Šofranac
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