Watch episode 1 of our Turkish politics miniseries below:
Nearly a hundred years ago Atatürk founded a political party. Over the past century it’s flirted with socialism, fascism and social democracy – and it’s still around today.
But the party hasn’t won an election in nearly 45 years and it hasn’t won outright in over 70 years. So what does this party believe in? And can it ever win an election again?
This is the story of Turkey’s Republican People’s Party, better known by its initials CHP.
It discusses the party’s origins and development of the single-party state, the introduction of a multiparty democracy and its early attempts to find an ideology.
Then it considers whether the left-of-centre position was successful and what happened in the half-century that followed.