The funeral of Deniz Baykal, former chair of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), was a rare display of unity for people in different parts of the political spectrum. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Baykal’s successor Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahçeli and other prominent figures attended the funeral in the capital Ankara on Tuesday.
Baykal died in his sleep at the age of 84 in his Ankara residence last Saturday. The veteran politician was embattled with illnesses in recent years. He is survived by his wife and two children.
Funeral prayers were performed for Baykal at Ahmet Hamdi Akseki Mosque in the capital. Ali Erbaş, head of the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) led the prayers before the burial at the State Cemetery, the final resting place of prominent politicians.
Baykal was interested in politics in his teens but formally joined the CHP in 1968 after his thesis as an associate professor candidate, which analyzed the party’s defeat in the 1965 elections, gained the attention of the party’s senior cadres. He was nominated for a parliamentary seat by the CHP in the 1973 elections and won it from his constituency and hometown, the southern province of Antalya. A law school graduate who later studied in the United States where he won a Rockefeller Foundation grant to study political sciences, Baykal was among the youngest ministers of the 1970s, when he was appointed as minister of finance in a coalition government established in 1974. He also served as minister of energy and natural resources. The 1980 coup disrupted his political career and he was briefly detained by the military junta and imposed a five-year political ban.
In the late 1980s, he joined the Social Democratic Populist Party (SHP) founded by former CHP members but returned to CHP as chairperson in 1992. He served as foreign minister in a coalition government set up in 1995. He resigned as CHP chair, which he was elected three times in 1999, after an election defeat but returned one year later as he was elected again. After winning multiple chairperson elections, he stepped down from this post in 2010, after a controversial sex tape conspiracy perpetrated by suspects linked to the Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ).
