Abstract

The 1990s was an era when Turkish political atmosphere was reshaped, old alliances fell apart and the dominant Kemalist bloc which included both center right and center left, went through serious corrosion. Working as a litmus paper for the nearly reformatted Turkish political atmosphere, the 1990s insinuates the historical turn in which conjectural crisis in the country was drifting fast to an organic crisis within a Gramscian rhetoric. Ecevit had sketched an up and down graph between 1987-1999. Actually, it’s possible to divide this period into two. Even though he took over a party that had 8.5% of votes while still in its “crawling” age from his wife Rahsan Ecevit in 1987, Bulent Ecevit first started his efforts towards installing Democratic Left concept in his base. Underlining that he cannot unite with SDPP, Ecevit was mostly left out of “solidarity in the left wing” arguments and he recorded that he would unite with his voters “not at the top, but within the masses.” While defending that social democracy rooted in Marxism wouldn’t grasp a base in Turkey, Ecevit was commenting that his party was on a “national left” spectrum, discussing terms like “belief respecting secularism” and “failure of Marxism.”