For readers who are not deeply familiar with the Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) or Turkish politics, the title may sound exaggerated. Yet, within a realistic framework, it accurately reflects the dynamics we aim to explore here. Around the world, traditional communist parties have often faced political and ideological hostility from within the left itself. Understanding how this phenomenon has unfolded in Turkey requires looking closely at the origins and historical assertion of TKP.
The unquestioned legitimacy of today’s TKP in carrying the party’s name begins with its role in restoring that name to political life and to the Turkish working class. To understand this claim, however, one must look briefly at a key historical turning point.
In the 1970s, Turkey found itself in an objectively revolutionary situation, as the system underwent a deep and structural crisis. This process was violently interrupted by the fascist military coup of September 12, 1980, which dealt a crushing blow to the left and to the working class movement as a whole. The defeat was enforced not only through repression, bans, and martial law, but also through executions and torture. The use of national symbols like the flag and national anthem during these brutal tortures was carefully designed to make the Turkish left hate its own country—to sever its emotional and political connection with it.
Tragically, this counterrevolutionary strategy worked. The Turkish left, in nearly all its components, lost hope in the country—some even turned against it. It is a painful story.
The fascist junta’s methods were extraordinarily harsh and inhumane, and the human and organizational toll they exacted must be understood.
Yet, the TKP’s rejection of the post-coup landscape was primarily a response to the ideological and political climate that took hold within the left itself.
In 1986, while political bans were still in effect, the Gelenek (Tradition) movement had been built around the theoretical socialist periodical Gelenek. Formed by the cadres who would later establish today’s TKP, this movement was a defiant challenge to the rising counterrevolutionary tide both in Turkey and in the world. It was also a direct confrontation with the revisionist tendencies gaining ground in Marxist-Leninist theory and practice.
This challenge deeply unsettled sections of the left that had abandoned revolutionary struggle, renounced the very idea of a socialist revolution, and subordinated their political identity to the increasingly dominant Kurdish nationalist movement, choosing to operate under its shadow.
Their discomfort stemmed from the sense that the TKP was “spoiling the game.” Just as the left was preparing to align itself conveniently with bourgeois political actors, the TKP insisted on a politics outside the system—exposing these alignments as pseudo-leftist. While the left had begun to center its politics on “peace,” “democracy,” and “justice”—themes that, though important, cannot replace the struggle against exploitation—the TKP argued that without a class basis, such struggles inevitably remain within the confines of bourgeois politics.
Thus, TKP’s emergence as a source of irritation—and ultimately, as an “object of hatred”—within the left began with its insistence on class struggle.
The Socialist Turkey Party, founded by the Gelenek movement in 1992, was banned in the following year. It was immediately reconstituted as the Socialist Power Party (SİP), which in 2001 adopted the historic name Communist Party of Turkey (TKP). At the time, it was still technically illegal to form a party under the “communist” title. Exploiting gaps in bourgeois law, the TKP defied this ban and brought the communist name back to Turkish politics.
Soon after TKP’s reestablishment, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in November 2002. The AKP’s rise was shaped by U.S. imperialism, Islamist sects, and big monopolies; it represented a coalition of business interests and religious orders. Its mission was to complete the counterrevolutionary process begun in 1980 by dismantling what remained of the republican, statist, and secular foundations established in 1923.
The ideological “vaccine” injected into the left by the 1980 coup—its anti-republican sentiment—resonated with the values the AKP promoted: reducing the state’s role, ending “top-down republicanism,” and expanding democracy and religious freedom. In reality, these meant deepening exploitation, eroding workers’ gains, empowering Sunni Islamism throughout state and society, and destroying the secular social fabric.
From the beginning, TKP recognized the AKP’s class nature and its role as a special mission party for capitalist restoration and imperialist integration. While TKP consistently and accurately opposed the AKP, much of the Turkish left—under the illusion that “the tutelary regime is being broken”—either openly or tacitly supported it at first.
During the same years, Turkey’s European Union accession process gained momentum. Following the 1999 Helsinki Summit, the idea of “the Europe of Labor” spread within the Turkish left—a fantasy that not only misled but also weakened working-class resistance to both imperialism and the AKP. The TKP stood alone against this pro-EU current, preventing the left from permanently sliding into a pro-European orientation. Even as other leftists gradually adjusted their rhetoric, resentment among the left toward the TKP deepened.
Later, when the Syriza experience in Greece emerged, much of the Turkish left sought to emulate it, while the TKP—together with its fraternal parties in Europe, particularly the Communist Party of Greece (KKE)—warned of the liberal illusions that such movements created at the expense of workers’ rights.
Soon after taking power, the AKP began its operation to dismantle the Republic, targeting the military and civilian bureaucracy through the Ergenekon and Balyoz trials. Hundreds were imprisoned on politically motivated charges. Once again, the AKP sought to win the support of liberals and leftists by appealing to their anti-republican sentiments. And once again, much of the left fell into this trap—some by remaining silent, others by framing the trials as “democratization” or “cleansing the deep state.” Although many of those targeted were not figures the TKP could politically endorse, the party focused on the broader project behind the trials—the AKP’s attempt to redesign Turkey—and stood against them.
In his 2009 book The Left Trapped Between Ergenekon and the AKP, TKP General Secretary Kemal Okuyan explained why supporting these trials in the name of the left was a scandal. Years later, when the left was forced to acknowledge that the TKP had been right, it did not abandon its hostility anyway.
The recurring tension between TKP and the rest of the Turkish left reflects, at its core, a fundamental difference in their perspectives. Over time, much of the left abandoned the idea of the actuality of a socialist revolution. During the AKP’s “liberal phase” in the first years of its government, class analysis was replaced by a focus on the “state versus society” contradiction. Later, as the AKP became more authoritarian, the left justified its abandonment of revolutionary politics under the banner of “united struggle against the palace regime.”
This tendency has persisted: much of the left now defines its politics in relation to the CHP (the social-democratic main opposition) or the DEM Party (the political party of Kurdish nationalism). During elections, this alignment becomes explicit—some leftist parties even field candidates on their lists and campaign for them—while in ordinary times it prevents the development of an independent socialist line. The TKP’s efforts to build such an independent path through social alliances have again made it a source of irritation, accused of “arrogance” and “sectarianism.”
During the “peace process,” this divide deepened further. While most of the left limited its criticism to whether the AKP would keep its promises, the TKP—while welcoming disarmament—warned that the process must be judged by its direction. The Party highlighted this process’ connection to U.S. imperialism’s plan to redesign the Middle East, its harmony with Turkish capital’s Neo-Ottomanist expansionism, and its Sunni-Islamist ideological foundation. TKP insisted that neither Turkish nor Kurdish workers had any interest in such a “capitalist peace.” Once again, the left chose to attack the TKP rather than engage with the content of its critique.
TKP long ago broke its ties with such a left that has distanced itself from revolution, avoided real struggle, and chosen the comfort of bourgeois political alliances. Yet as hostility toward the TKP within the left has grown, public interest in the party has increased. This rising attention in the political sphere confirms the accuracy of the TKP’s decision at its 14th Congress in 2024—its decision to make a clean break from the rest of the left that lacks any will and action for organizing a genuine revolutionary struggle.
* Cansu Oba is a member of the TKP Central Committee