Türkiye

Date range: 1983-2020
Since the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1924 there has been a sharp political cleavage in Türkiye between Kemalist liberal secularists (including most of the civil service, military and judiciary) and the more religious bulk of the population in rural inland areas. That state institutions have so consistently sought to suppress Islamist politics has provided a context in which Islamist parties can easily paint populist “anti-system” narratives about themselves and the political class (Cizre and Çınar 2003, 310), and it often seems that Islamism is more relevant as a token of this social division than as a force of genuine religiosity or theocracy (M. H. Yavuz 1997, 74). This pattern can be traced in Türkiye through the Democrat Party, the National Order Party, the National Salvation Party and since 1980 through the Welfare Party, the Virtue Party, the Felicity Party and the Justice and Development Party – each of which was linked in some way to its predecessor (often including leaders and structures).

Case notes

The Welfare Party

The Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, WP) was led by veteran Islamist politician Necmettin Erbakan, who had previously led several other Islamist parties which were banned by constitutional courts. The party emerged in the late 1980s and won a plurality in the 1995 general elections. According to Ayata, the narratives of the WP stressed the role of western imperial powers in the humiliation and backwardness of rural Turkish Muslims, and advocated Islamism as the only redemptive path (Ayata 1996, 54). The party’s “Just Order” platform actually focused heavily on social justice and the plight of the poor – even more than leftist parties – rather than on theocratic advocacy, and built on the supposed contempt that the coastal and urban liberal elite had for the masses (Ayata 1996, 54; White 1997, 26). That said, we have seen no evidence that the wealthy themselves were a class of “other” that the party countered, and it seems to have left some discursive space for capitalist accumulation in its literature (Onis 1997, 753). It also had significant connections to Islamic business elites (Onis 1997, 758; Gülalp 2001, 439) (OTH_ECONOMIC = 1). According to Onis (Onis 1997, 753) the party’s rhetoric against the West was “relentless”, and it consistently accused the established parties of being “imitators of the West” (OTH_FOREIGN = 3)

In the lead up to the 1995 election, Erbakan refused to share a debate stage with the major party leaders on the grounds that they were all imitators of the West (Onis 1997, 755), continuing its hard anti-political class rhetoric that built a “WP vs the Rest” narrative (OTH_POLCLASS = 3). While the party connected Islam with the homogenous “people” (M. H. Yavuz 1997, 67), we’ve coded it 1 on OTH_ETHNIC as it actually had a pan-ethnic identity and sought votes from Kurdish areas. Despite the fact that the military has been so closely involved in the secular liberal political establishment that WP opposed, we cannot see any evidence that it constituted an “other” for the party (OTH_MILITARY = 1). It should also be stressed that the combination of religious identity and leftish economic platforms make the party very difficult to characterise on a L-R scale (Onis 1997, 753) – for now we’ve coded it as R. The party had no prior position in power (INSIDER = 1) and there is no evidence that the charisma of its leaders was particularly relevant to its populist discourse (CHARISMA = 1).

The Virtue Party

The Virtue Party (Fazilet Partisi VP) was created by the Welfare Party leadership when it was banned by a constitutional court decision in 1997. While the Erbakan and several other leaders could not lead the new party, they had a significant say over its direction and virtually controlled it. However, the VP sharply shifted its tone from the WP, most notably by enthusiastically embracing EU membership and removing the anti-Western discourse from its ideology (OTH_FOREIGN = 1). This was arguably because it saw EU legal protections as the only thing that could curb the Turkish state’s continual intervention against Islamist political parties (Taniyici 2003, 476). As with WP, we’ve seen no evidence of ethnocentric rhetoric (OTH_ETHNIC = 1). The party also sought to soften its Islamist image, indicating a relaxing of various platforms and promoting several women into its leadership to show its more secular credentials (Mecham 2004, 348). It is not clear however that there was any softening of its anti-political class rhetoric (OTH_POLCLASS = 3). As Mecham puts it:

Virtue found its new voice as an opposition party by shifting from the old claim that Turkey was not religious enough to the claim that Turkey was not democratic enough. Both charges attempted to frame the Turkish regime as illegitimate to some degree, but the charges of poor democracy sought to engage the secular democratic system on its own terms (Mecham 2004, 346).

That said, the variation in all of these variables is tricky to code because many in Türkiye saw the party as a continuation of Welfare, and considered its softening of rhetoric to be more strategic than genuine. The party was split between Erbakan loyalists and reformers (including Abdullah Gul and Recep Tayyip Erdogan), who became increasingly antagonistic before the 1999 election (Mecham 2004, 347) and ended up forming separate parties after Virtue was banned in 2001 (Felicity Party and Truth and Justice respectively).

Justice and Development Party

The Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) was founded in 2001 by former Istanbul mayor Recep Tayyip Erdogan, then one of the most popular politicians in the country. The name “AK Party” utilised the Turkish word ak, which means both “white” and “clean”, symbolising the party’s commitment to renew the impure and corrupt Turkish state (Mecham 2004, 349). It initially maintained Virtue’s more moderate expressions of Islamist identity (Dagi 2008, 29), but shed the Welfare/Virtue Islamic logos in favour of a simple light bulb, and made a point of recruiting more women into leadership positions (Mecham 2004, 353). Erdogan and the AKO have remained the dominant forces in Turkish politics since it took power in the 2002 elections with 34.3% of the vote.

Attempting to capture the more mainstream centre-right vote, AKP campaigned against corruption in the Turkish state and advocated religious liberty (maintaining the importance of Islam as a social institution) while accepting the secular principles of the state and shedding some its “anti-system” aura. However Erdogan’s Welfare background and several comments he made in the 2002 race meant that anti-political class rhetoric was still a significant part of the party’s identity. In the party’s 2002 election campaign, for example, Erdogan said:

My story is the story of this people. Either the people will win and come to power, or the pretentious and oppressive minority estranged from the reality of Anatolia and looking over it with disdain will remain in power. The authority to decide on this belongs to the people. Enough is enough, sovereignty belongs to the people (Aytaç and Öniş 2014, 45).

In its first election we have decided to code it 2 on the OTH_POLCLASS variable (see Çarkoğlu 2002, 39; Gürsoy 2021, 166).

In its early days the party was stridently pro-EU membership – more so than Virtue. Despite this, various personal legacies of Erdogan and Gül’s time in Welfare/Virtue – Erdogan is on record in 1994 saying that one could either be a secularist or a Muslim, but not both (see Mecham 2004, 247) – meant that the Islamist brand was still somewhat established, and the party at this point was still essentially an Islamist protest party in the Welfare tradition. Several scholars have pointed out the nativist (Kaya, Robert, and Tecmen 2020, 363) and ethnically exclusionary nature of this majoritarian narrative (Arat-Koç 2018; Gürsoy 2021). For this the party deserves a 2 for OTH_ETHNIC. Opposition to immigrants, however, have not been an important component of AKP’s discourse (Gürsoy 2021, 161) (OTH_IMMIGRANTS =1). According to Gürsoy “in the early years of AKP rule, ‘the elite’ meant most fundamentally the secular military and judicial establishment.” (OTH_MILITARY = 3 from 2002), but after 2007 foreign enemies were elevated to the primary enemies of the people. By the 2018 elections, Erdogan and the AKP were characterising their domestic rivals as the “domestic collaborators” of Türkiye’s foreign enemies (Sözen 2019, 12; see also Gürsoy 2021, 166) (OTH_FOREIGN = 1 in 2002, 3 from 2007).

It is difficult to pinpoint the time when AK started veering off into a sharper populist tone with more defined denemies. We have settled on the 2007 snap election which followed the crisis of electing the president (done by parliament). Here it seems that threats of intervention by the military angered Erdogan who responded by leveraging his now well-established base of popular support against them explicitly in a “people/nation” vs. ’secularists/institutions” narrative during the campaign (Dinçşahin 2012; Elçi 2019, 5). Note that some scholars (Yabanci 2016, 599) suggest that the constitutional referendum in 2010 and the 2013 Gezi park protests as the key turning point. Whatever the precise turning point, by the 2015 elections Erdogan had transitioned to a clearer populist anti-elite discourse on a number fronts, criticising all other politicians, media intellectuals as part of an elite tied to previous corruption and maladministration, and sharply criticising the western media, particularly over their criticism of the 2013 Gezi protests (Erçetin and Erdoğan 2018) (OTH_POLCLASS = 3 2007-). This was packaged in his rhetoric around the “New Turkey” (post constitutional reforms) in which the Kemalist establishment was cast as remnants of the “Old Turkey” (Selçuk 2016, 577). According to Selçuk political opponents were increasingly portrayed as “traitors to the nation” or “coup sympathisers” (the latter after the 2016 coup attempt) (Selçuk 2016; see also Gürsoy 2021, 166–67).

Liberal democratic norms are also difficult to track with AK. We think the best point to elevate LIBDEMNORMS to a 2 is the 2010 period, where according to Yabanci attacks on the media in particular escalated (Yabanci 2016). We have further elevated this to a 3 after the coup attempt in 2016. Further research into AK should determine whether its religious populist rhetoric has increased back to the scale of Welfare in the 1990s. The literature suggest that Erdogan has always been the charismatic central figure in the representation of the party (Elçi 2019, 5; Kaya, Robert, and Tecmen 2020, 370; Selçuk, Hekimci, and Erpul 2019; Sawae 2020, 261) (CHARISMA = 3). While the party has a complicated policy profile, we agree with the general view of the literature that it is a right-wing party to its cultural majoritarianism and nationalism (LRPOSITION = R). We have coded AK 1 for INSIDER in 2002, and 3 for every subsequent election after Erdogan became president.

The Young Party

The Young Party (Genç Parti, GP), was a nationalist party built around businessman and media mogul Cem Uzan, who railed against the establishment and promised impossible benefits to voters (Çarkoğlu 2002, 39). He is generally considered populist (Robins 2003, 550) and “Berlusconi-like” (Kaya 2003, 208) in the literature. GP only mustered 7.3% of the vote in 2002, below the 10% needed to enter parliament in a race dominated by the ascendency of the AKP. He returned in 2007 but only won 3% of the vote.

All sources suggest Uzan was extremely hostile to the political establishment (Çarkoğlu 2002, 39), and is occasionally considered “anti-system” (Kaya 2003, 208) (OTH_POLCLASS = 3). The party was also considered “ultra-nationalist” (Başlevent, Ki̇rmanoğlu, and Şenatalar 2005, 548; Baykan 2018) and hostile to the IMF (in the context of Türkiye’s economic crisis) (Rubin 2005), which Uzan claimed was colonizing Türkiye (Gökçen, Homer, and Oates 2006, 266). He was also highly critical of the IMF, World Bank, the USA, and the EU (Kaya 2003, 208; Küçük 2018, 578), whom he considered opposed to the nation. For this we have labelled the party 2 on OTH_FOREIGN, but further research should determine the precise nature of this nationalist rhetoric. A backstory here is Uzan’s commercial dispute with Motorola, which featured heavily in both the media and his campaign. We’ve seen no evidence in the secondary literature that for GP to register on the OTH_ETHNIC or OTH_IMMIGRANTS variables (both = 1).

GP was seen as a nationalist competitor to the Nationalist Action Party (Robins 2003, 550), but also toward the centre of the spectrum due to the something-for-everyone nature of its policies (Çarkoğlu 2002, 39; Carcoglu 2006, 165). The literature variously considers it “right wing” (Muftuler-Bac 2003, 428), “conservative nationalist” (Kaya 2003, 208) and “centre right” (Küçük 2018, 577). We have labelled it centre-right (LRPOSITION = CR). In place of any considered policy agenda, the GP is universally considered a “one-man show” (Çarkoğlu 2002, 39) dominated by Cem’s flamboyant personality and reliant on his media organisation (CHARISMA = 3). According to Çarkoğlu, Uzan’s campaign violated several electoral laws with impunity (Çarkoğlu 2002, 39), and although this evidence could be corroborated we’ve coded it 2 on LIBDEMNORMS.

Not included

The Nationalist Action Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP) is a very difficult party to code by our definitions. It is a radically nationalist party, socially conservative, statist, anti-globalisation and critical to both European and Russian threats to the Turkish national interest. Its traditional enemies are foreigners and their domestic collaborators, who include leftists, Kurds, Alevi Muslims, and liberal intellectuals (M. Yavuz 2002, 206). The party has paramilitary links, and has celebrated various former militia members (Cınar and Arıkan 2002, 73). Its radical nationalism has a Manichean proportion as it has discussed threats to the nation and the party’s role in saving it, and in doing so it has generally spoken for the true Turkish people in a holistic sense (Erdoğan and Uyan-Semerci 2020). It has also used acerbic rhetoric against opponents, whom it has accused of “treason” among other things (Selçuk, Hekimci, and Erpul 2019, 556). However we have not found enough evidence that the party was ever opposed to an “elite” governing the country against the people’s interests. Instead, the party has considered itself an ally of the state. Erdoğan and Uyan-Semerci, who have looked specifically into the potential populism of the MHP under long-time leader Devlet Bahçeli, conclude simply that “For Bahçeli, the elites of Türkiye are not among the usual enemies of the nation” (Erdoğan and Uyan-Semerci 2020). On this basis we’ve elected not to include the BHP in the dataset, as it appears to be far right but not populist by our definition. Further research should clarify this.

References

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