Turks, Armenians and the possibility of a sea change in the opposition

On April 23, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan released a statement in which he offered his condolences to Armenians and asked the Armenian government to address "our mutual pain" in a constructive manner.
Amidst the huge flow of information, however, many seemed to miss another historic statement from the ranks of the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP). Ambassador Faruk Loğoğlu, a Republican parliamentary and chief foreign policy advisor to the party, remarked that his party did not have any problems with the prime minister extending his condolences to descendants of Ottoman Armenians.
Moments later, he raised the point that the government should not have waited so long to take such a step, a surprisingly positive development given the main opposition party's long-time position on the matter and the serious risk of backlash from constituents. Over the past week, the statement was met with little resistance from the CHP leadership. As anyone with some sense of Republican politics expected upon reading Loğoğlu's statement, it took little time for Kemalist hardliners to launch a media campaign against the CHP leadership.Throughout the past week, Aydınlık and Ulusal Kanal, semi-official media outlets of the Workers' Party (İP) with a considerable following among CHP ranks, repeatedly accused the opposition leadership of collaborating with the AK Party and pledging allegiance to the U.S. "The people have seen their power last June," a columnist noted. "And the people will send a strong message on Labor Day and again on May 19, [the anniversary of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's launch of the War of Independence in 1919]." The argument echoed sentiments that Kemalist hardliners have long expressed during street protests, coffeehouse chatter and in tabloids for the past decade.

Over the past years, the question of Ottoman Armenians has proved particularly challenging for the AK Party government's opponents and, by extension, the CHP. In 2005, Boğaziçi University announced that it would host an academic conference titled "Ottoman Armenians During the Decline of the Empire," an absolute taboo at the time although many Turks now find themselves able to entertain, if not agree with, claims of genocide. As protesters gathered outside the campus and were denied entry to the event site, the conference was postponed and relocated to Bilgi University, where participants left the campus as Turkish nationalists and secularists threw eggs to express their frustration with the mere mention of Ottoman Armenians.

In 2008, the shockwaves hit closer to home for the CHP as Mr. Erdoğan's government initiated talks with Yerevan to reach a bilateral agreement the following year. In response, a Republican parliamentarian claimed that President Abdullah Gül failed to remain impartial to the agreement since his mother was Armenian. The ensuing legal battle resulted in a $1000 (TL 2,133) fine over two years later but the affair repeatedly came up.

The main opposition, now under new management, has since sought to rekindle its ties with the outside world. As the party established a series of contact offices abroad and partially revised its platform, the new leadership has made an effort to tell the world their side of the story. While the Republicans ran into major problems in their attempts to persuade voters that they could no longer remain aggressive toward the Kurds and religious Muslims, among others, they fared arguably better with foreign audiences by lending support to Gezi Park revolts and invoking secularism as a trump card against some of the ruling party's conservative policies. Today, the CHP find themselves between a rock and a hard place.Loyal voters still need to be convinced that their party did not shake hands with "the imperialists," while the AK Party remains more flexible on sensitive issues including the Kurdish peace process and dialogue with Armenians.