Birgül Ayman Güler, İzmir Member of Parliament for CHP (the Republican People’s Party), has resigned from her party. In a written statement Güler criticised the banner stating “Time to face the Genocide” carried by a group including CHP MPs during the Hrant Dink commemoration and the continuing ‘solution process’ for the Kurdish Question.
"The structure I find myself in today is not the CHP I supported ideologically when I was elected Member of Parliament. The administrators of the ‘New CHP’ have supported unfounded accusations of Genocide, and this was done by suppressing Turkey’s means of expressing itself. In a year like 2015, as Turkey comes under attack, CHP Central Office administrators have openly declared their support by carrying a banner stating ‘Time to face the Genocide’.”
“The support provided during the meetings of the Consensus Commission for the new Constitution to the goal of the AKP-BDP partnership to ‘remove Turkish citizenship from the Constitution’ was consolidated with the backing of legislative regulations like the solution law that opened a door to the foreign third eye [sic]. The effort to transform the principle of laïcité into secularity is evident in the ineffective opposition against attacks that have damaged and destroyed education, and in alliances veiled in denial. The political party I hereby resign from is not the CHP, but a politically inconsistent structure.”
Güler also criticized CHP economic policy
In her resignation statement, Güler also criticized the CHP’s economic policy:
“The New CHP has deserted the national economy approach, and has become a structure that upholds not the national productive industries, but the interest benefits of global financial markets. The principle of fair income distribution has been abandoned, and the party’s policy has been trapped within neoliberal policies of ‘fighting impoverishment’. Statism has been declared an outmoded principle, while privatization has been accepted almost as a natural policy. Populism has been declared hollow rhetoric and cast aside, yet planning and development based on the social welfare state has been replaced by dependence on the market dynamics of global economy. The New CHP is a structure operating to dissolve the CHP and its party organization.”
Güler stated that she would continue to serve as an independent Member of Parliament for İzmir.
The resignation means that the CHP now has 125 seats in Parliament. Istanbul MP Ercan Cengiz had resigned from the CHP last week.
