Right-wing populism in Turkey and the 2023 elections

ABSTRACT

This article examines right-wing populism in the May 2023 elections of Turkey, mainly focussing on the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi-AKP). Using the ideational approach of populism, I first briefly examine the AKP’s predecessors, the Democratic Party (Demokrat Parti-DP) and the National Outlook (Milli Görüş) movement, which exploited the divide between secular elites and devout Muslims, based on a cultural conflict between two contrasting visions of a good society rooted in secularism and Islam. The AKP carries three characteristics of populism: people-centrism, anti-elitism, and a Manichean outlook, widely applied in the party’s discourse during recent elections. This study illustrates the fact that populism in Turkey damages the democratic game, where opponents are seen as legitimate rivals, as evidenced in the country’s democracy scores. Also, right-wing populism during the 2023 elections depicted the opposition as illegitimate enemies, both non-native and non-national, illustrating the moralistic imagination of politics.

KEYWORDS:

• Populism
• Turkey
• 2023 elections
• justice and development party
• democratic party
• national outlook

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and guest editors, Mustafa Aydin and Kerem Yildirim, for their constructive comments and criticisms on earlier drafts. I also would like to thank Robert Lewis for his meticulous copyediting services.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Using an ideational approach instead of defining populism as a strategy or discourse has two basic advantages. First, the ‘thin-centrism’ of populism allows us to analyse its symbiotic relationship with other thick ideologies (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2013). Second, from a methodological point of view, the ideational approach allows us to apply it to various methods, from text and content analysis to survey research and comparative case studies (Hawkins and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017).

2. Also see Taşkın (2022) and İlhan Demiryol (2020) for a detailed historical analysis of populism in Turkey.

3. Several studies criticize the shortcomings of Mardin’s (1973) approach. First, Mardin’s one-dimensional explanation underestimates other significant cleavages in Turkish society, such as nationalism and sectarianism. Second, the institutions and opinions of the institutions within the centre and periphery do not show consistency over time. Instead, changes have occurred in different periods (Bakıner 2018). Wuthrich (2013) also claims that electoral outcomes between 1950 and 1965 illustrate an opposite outcome for the centre-periphery. While the DP and their successors obtained better electoral results in the more developed areas, the CHP was more successful in the less developed regions. However, since this article’s aim is not to confirm or falsify the centre-periphery but rather to apply it to explain populism in Turkey, further research should continue this debate elsewhere.

4. I used ‘ggplot2’ package to generate the graph (Wickham 2016). Data are from Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project version 13 (Coppedge et al. 2023).

5. In Turkish, ‘the people’ can be translated as both ‘millet’ (nation) and ‘halk.’ In this article, I used both terms as ‘the people’ interchangeably, unless ‘millet’ directly indicates a (Turkish) nationalist connotation. In the Turkish context, the meanings of the people refer to two different homogeneous imagined communities (Anderson 1993) or empty signifiers in the Laclaunian sense (Laclau 2005). The same problem also occurs in Russian, in which ‘narod’ indicates the people and the nation. For example, the motto of narodniks ‘khozhdeniye v narod’ can be translated as ‘going to the people,’ which became the name of the late Ottoman populists’ journal ‘Halka Doğru.’ According to Toprak (2013, 166), during the Second Constitutional Era (1908–1920), the meaning of ‘halk’ implied ‘social will comprised of the citizens.’ Similar to ‘millet,’ ‘halk’ represents a collectivity. ‘millet,’ on the other hand, corresponds to an Islamic organic collectivity for right-wing parties, a meaning which accepts Muslims as autochthons and the essence of Turkey (Bora 2017). While secular parties mostly refer to ‘halk,’ right-wingers use ‘millet’ while talking about the people.

6. Scholars classify the CHP during the 1970s, and the HDP during the 2010s as left-wing populist parties. However, since I am only focusing on right-wing populists, I will not go into the details of the CHP and HDP’s populism. See other studies that focus on CHP’s (e.g., Erdoğan 1998; Çarkoğlu et al. 2022) and HDP’s (Tekdemir 2019; Kaya 2019) populism.

7. See Aslanidis (2022), Rovira Kaltwasser (2019), and Verbeek and Zaslove (2017) for critiques of ‘economic’ populism and misuse of the concept.

8. https://twitter.com/RTErdogan/status/213724260655579136

9. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, the mastermind is ‘to plan a difficult activity, often a crime, in detail and make certain that it happens successfully.’ In the Turkish context, it corresponds to foreign powers, including their domestic collaborators, who try to influence politics, the economy, and society against the people’s interests, using all means.

10. Rabia (in Arabic meaning four) is associated with the Rabia al-Adawiya Square in Egypt, where a sit-in by the Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters to commemorate Mohamed Morsi’s presidency led to clashes and 638 deaths after being dispersed by security forces in 2013. In 2017, the AKP incorporated the meaning of the Rabia symbol into its guidelines, symbolizing ‘one nation, one flag, one homeland, one state,’ with President Erdoğan declaring the Rabia sign as the official symbol of the AKP (Üngür 2023).

11. https://twitter.com/avhamzadag/status/1641901464451796998

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ezgi Elçi

Ezgi Elçi is an assistant professor in the Department of International Relations at Özyeğin University. He obtained his Ph.D. in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Koç University. His research interests are political behavior and political communication. More specifically, his research focuses on populism, nativism, democratization, and collective nostalgia.