Deniz Baykal

Deniz Baykal

Deniz Baykal (born July 20, 1938 in Antalya ) is a Turkish lawyer and politician . With brief interruptions, he was party chairman of the Republican People's Party (CHP) from 1992 to 2010 and held several ministerial offices in various governments in the Republic of Turkey.

Baykal is the son of Hüseyin Hilmi and Feride. He studied law in Ankara and later went to the United States to study at Berkeley University of California and Columbia University . In 1963 he did his PhD in Ankara. He then worked as a lecturer at Ankara University .

In 1973 he ended his academic career and was elected member of the CHP in the Turkish parliament . Between 1974 and 1978 he was Minister of Finance and later Minister for Energy and Natural Resources in the cabinet of Bülent Ecevit . After the military coup in 1980 , like other politicians, he was banned from working for five years. In addition, all parties including the CHP were closed after the coup.

In 1987 Baykal moved back into parliament with the Social Democratic Populist Party (SHP), a successor party to the CHP. In the meantime he was General Secretary of the SHP and resigned from the party on September 10, 1990. Two years later he became party chairman of the newly formed CHP. In 1995 Baykal was Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister in a coalition government made up of the Party of the Right Way (DYP) and the CHP . In the 1999 election , his party failed to make it to parliament. It was not until 2002 that Deniz Baykal became an MP again. Until May 2010 he was the opposition leader in parliament, according to critics he was "the best opposition leader a government could wish for" because he "limited himself to saying no and surrounded himself with concrete heads from his own generation".

From 2003 to July 1, 2008 Baykal was one of the vice-presidents of the Socialist International (SI) . On May 10, 2010, Baykal resigned from the CHP party leadership after a compromising, secretly recorded video of a sexual encounter between him and a CHP MP was posted on the Internet. Baykal accused the Turkish government of being responsible for the publication of the video and criticized an illegal invasion of his privacy. The Internet portal YouTube removed the recording shortly after it was published. His successor as the 7th party leader of the CHP was on May 22, 2010 Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu .

Web links

Commons : Deniz Baykal  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Baykal wants military drawn into debates (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Susanne Güsten in Der Tagesspiegel
2. ↑ Baykal, başkan yardımcılığı görevinden oldu ( Memento of the original from June 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Zaman Online , accessed July 1, 2008.  
3. ↑ Turkey: Opposition chief resigns after sex scandal - Spiegel Online , accessed on May 12, 2010.