Mustafa Bülent Ecevit (28 May 1925 – 5 November 2006) was a Turkish statesman, poet, writer, scholar, and journalist. He served as the Prime Minister of Turkey four times between 1974 and 2002, specifically in 1974, 1977, 1978–79, and 1999–2002. Ecevit was Chairman of the Republican People's Party (CHP) from 1972 to 1980, and became Chairman of the Democratic Left Party (DSP) in 1987.
Ecevit was elected a CHP MP from Ankara in the 1957 general election and came to prominence as Minister of Labour in İsmet İnönü's cabinets, representing the rising left-wing faction of the party. In 1972, Ecevit became leader of the CHP. His leadership reached out to working-class voters and cemented the party as "Left of Centre".
Ecevit first became Prime Minister in 1974, during which he retracted the ban on cultivation of opium and invaded Cyprus. He formed two more governments in 1977 and 1978–1979 which were marked by increasing polarisation, deadlock, and political violence that ended with the 1980 coup.
Following the coup, Ecevit was banned from politics for ten years. During this decade, the Democratic Left Party (DSP) was established under the leadership of his wife, Rahşan. When the ban was lifted in 1987, he became the head of the DSP. While heading a caretaker government for the 1999 general election, PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan was captured in Kenya, allowing DSP to emerge victorious. The DSP-MHP-ANAP coalition (1999–2002) introduced important political and economic reforms, as well as beginning Turkish accession into the European Union. The MHP's withdrawal from the coalition led to the government's collapse, and at the subsequent 2002 snap election, the DSP was ejected from Parliament after being unable to clear the electoral threshold. Ecevit resigned as Chairman of the party in 2004. He died on 5 November 2006 of circulatory and respiratory failure.
Ecevit is known for being Turkey's only left-wing Prime Minister. His chairmanship resulted in the highest shares of votes CHP or any other left-wing party have ever gained in Turkish history. He is credited for introducing social democratic politics to Turkey by a combination of Kemalism with social democracy, thus making social democracy a core tenet in modern Kemalist ideology. Ecevit is the last non-AKP Prime Minister of Turkey.
Mustafa Bülent was born 28 May 1925 in Istanbul to a middle-class family. He was named after his paternal grandfather Mustafa Şükrü Efendi, who was an Islamic scholar of Kurdish origin but born in a village in Kastamonu. Mustafa Şükrü's son and Bülent's father Fahri Ecevit was a professor of forensic medicine in Ankara University's Law School. Fahri later entered politics and served as a Republican People's Party member of parliament for Kastamonu between 1943-1950. His mother Fatma Nazlı, was among the first women in Turkey to paint professionally.
Bülent Ecevit's maternal great-grandfather was the Meccan Sheikh-ul-Islam Hacı Emin Pasha, who served to protect the holy sites of Hejaz in the Ottoman Empire. The inheritance of his estate, which consisted of approximately 110 decares of land and 99 acres of the Masjid an-Nabawi was left to him once Ecevit's mother died. One lawyer valued the estate at almost $2 billion, while unofficial valuation made by a Medina Court put it at $11 billion. In the end Ecevit donated the proceeds of the estate to the Directorate of Religious Affairs for the benefit of Turkish Hajjis, after his retirement from politics.
Ecevit had no siblings or children.
Education, journalism, and writing
In 1944, Ecevit graduated from Robert College in Istanbul. He started work as a translator at the General Directorate for Press and Publication (Turkish: Basın Yayın Genel Müdürlüğü). In 1946, shortly after marrying his classmate Zekiye Rahşan Aral, he moved to London to work in the Turkish embassy as a press attaché. During his stay he studied Bengali, Sanskrit and Art History at the School of Oriental and African Studies but did not graduate. He also indulged in composing Sufi poetry.
Bülent Ecevit was not only a politician but also a poet, journalist and a writer. In the 1950s, he worked as an editor for Ulus, and then Yeni Ulus, Halkçı, and Forum. He later reported that both Ulus and Forum were two significant parts of his intellection life of that period.
In 1955 Ecevit went to the United States for three months as a guest journalist for the Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina, and was disturbed by the racism he witnessed in the American South. On his last day at the newspaper he wrote a front-page article about how strange it was that Americans took it upon themselves to fight oppression in the world while white Americans were
“guilty of refusing to drink from the same fountain as the man who has fought on the same front for the same cause; guilty of refusing to travel on the same coach or seat as the man who has been working with equal ardor for a common community; guilty of refusing to pray to God side by side with the man who believes in the same prophet's teaching.”
On a State Department fellowship, he returned to the US with a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship Scholarship in 1957, studying social psychology and Middle East history at Harvard University for eight months. He attended lectures on anti-communism with Olof Palme and Bertrand Russell and attended Henry Kissinger's Harvard International Seminar.
Even as a politician he continued writing for various newspapers, including the daily Milliyet in 1965, the monthly Özgür İnsan magazine in 1972, the weekly Arayış in 1981, and the monthly Güvercin magazine in 1988. Ecevit also translated works by Rabindranath Tagore, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Bernard Lewis into Turkish. Ecevit was successful in these literary endeavors despite never having graduated from a university, a fact that prevented him from ever running for the Presidency of the Turkish Republic.
Bülent Ecevit returned to Turkey in 1950 as a journalist, eventually writing for Ulus. Writing about politics made him interested in pursuing a career of it, so he registered with the Republican People's Party (CHP) Çankaya branch in 1954, eventually taking part in its Youth Branch Executive Board. At the age of thirty two, he was elected into parliament for the first time in 1957, representing Ankara as a member of the CHP. He was part of the party's delegation to the Constituent Assembly to draft a new constitution after the 1960 military coup d'état. At the age of thirty six, he served as the Minister of Labour in three coalition governments headed by İsmet İnönü between 1961 and 1965. Under his purview, the Law on Collective Bargaining, Strikes and Lockouts was signed, which as well as expanding social security privileges, finally allowed Turkish workers the right to strike and collective bargaining.
By 1965, Ecevit was the leader of the "Democratic Left Movement", a young and energetic left-wing faction in the CHP. His closeness with left-wing politics came from his admiration of the Labour Party and the burgeoning welfare state he was exposed to while studying in Britain. He pressured his mentor İnönü to adopt a new party program known as Left of Center for the general elections that year, arguing that democratic socialism was the best way to combat communism. The party lost the election to Süleyman Demirel's center-right Justice Party. In opposition, the party was racked with internal power struggles, as Ecevit and Turhan Feyzioğlu fought over the party's political orientation. İnönü reluctantly favored Ecevit (who he thought was too young), and in the 18th ordinary CHP congress held in 1966 he was elected secretary general of the CHP. An extraordinary congress held the next year saw 47 deputies and senators led by Feyzioğlu leave the CHP to found the Reliance Party. In 1969, secretary general Ecevit announced a village development program and using the slogan "Land for those who cultivate it, water for those who utilize it."
Another inter-party crisis occurred in the military memorandum of 1971, as Ecevit resigned from his position in protest against İnönü's decision to support the military government. He objected the memorandum, saying that it was directed against the Left of Center movement within the CHP. Heated exchanges occurred between the once old allies, with at one point İnönü saying "[It's] Either me or Bülent!" promising that he would resign if his party did not have confidence in him. On 8 May 1972 İsmet İnönü lost a vote of confidence to Ecevit in an extraordinary congress. İnönü thus was the first general chairman in Turkish political history to lose his position as a result of a party leadership vote.