CHP Sonrası Parti İnşası: Gençlik ve Sınıfsal Yenilenme
Party-Building after the CHP: Youth and Class-Based Renewal

Summary/Abstract: This article examines how long-standing, centralized, conservative-nationalist, populist, or competitively authoritarian governments can be challenged through youth movements, new parties, social movements, and class coalitions. Drawing on Poland, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Chile, Serbia, and Turkey, it asks under what conditions youth mobilization and new political parties can generate democratic transformation against hegemonic power structures similar to the AKP. The article argues that youth movements alone are insufficient for durable change. Democratic transformation becomes possible when youth energy is connected to the working class, the working poor, women workers, pensioners, tenants, small shopkeepers, the rural poor, and precarious workers within a new social bloc. In successful cases, young people become not only protesters but also candidates, party founders, organizers, program writers, and carriers of legitimacy. However, in many cases, workers and the poor provide electoral support while remaining weakly represented in decision-making. The article therefore argues that a new social democratic party emerging from a breakaway from the CHP would remain limited if it relied only on youth, renewal, and democracy. A genuine alternative requires labor quotas, young precariat representation, women workers’ representation, pensioners’ assemblies, tenant organizations, trade-union partnerships, primary elections, and a class based candidate pool.

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