Responses of far right parties to refugees in hybrid regimes: the case of MHP in Turkey

ABSTRACT

Studies on far right party behaviour mostly focus on democracies. While valuable, they do not fully explain the behaviour of such parties in other regime settings. We argue that non-ruling parties in hybrid regimes, including far right parties, respond to topics like immigration differently from their counterparts in democracies. As an example, we explore the puzzling behaviour of the leading Turkish far right party, MHP, toward Syrian refugees in Turkey. We argue that MHP has prioritised ideological infiltration on policymaking over vote seeking on the issue, which can explain the divergence between the sentiments of its supporters and its behaviour. Aside from the literature on immigration, far right parties and Turkish politics, our discussions can contribute to the literature on nondemocratic regimes in general.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration
• far right parties
• hybrid regimes
• Turkey
• Syrian refugees

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 We use the terms 'refugee' and 'immigrant' interchangeably, which is not uncommon in the literature (e.g. Norman 2019). For contrasting views on the subject see UNHCR (2016), Crawley and Skleparis (2018).

2 Except for Jordan and Lebanon, which are listed as ‘partly free’ by the Freedom House, none of the listed countries here are in the ‘free’ category. (https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-world/scores).

3 Our choice here is purely practical: Our preliminary findings are not sensitive to display the nuances between hybrid and authoritarian regimes. Therefore, methodologically, picking any form of nondemocratic regime should not jeopardise the overall validity of our current findings. However, they can be discarded by more in-depth studies that can explicitly measure the impact of regime type nuances on far-right party behaviour later.

4 The shift from the parliamentarian into the presidential system yielded two electoral alliances: Millet İttifakı (Nation Alliance) formed by CHP and other opposition parties excluded in this study and Cumhur İttifakı (People’s Alliance) formed by AKP, MHP and BBP.

5 In Turkish context, these words of President Erdoğan (23 December 2020) thus gains further meaning: ‘Like everything else, we hope to bring the local and national version the [political] opposition to our country.’ (All translations from Turkish are ours).

6 Survey results reflect which alliance a respondent supports, but not her party preference.

7 Available at https://www.tbmm.gov.tr/tutanak/tutanaklar.htm. Although Syrians began to arrive in 2011, we also included 2010 to increase robustness.

8 Our data on HDP (Halkların Demokrasi Partisi) is not as comprehensive as on MHP and CHP. It is because HDP was established in 2012 as the latest successor to a chain of former pro-Kurdish minority parties that were closed earlier by the state. The co-leaders of HDP did not officially assume their office until 2014. Due to these interruptions and the formation process of HDP, public speeches on their website are not as comprehensive as the other parties.

9 Data available at https://www.tbmm.gov.tr/develop/owa/yazili_sozlu_soru_gd.sorgu_baslangic (for Past Period Written and Oral Question Proposals Inquiry Form, which covers the general assemblies for the 24th-26th Periods (28 June 2011–15 July 2011, 01 October 2011–14 August 2012, 01 October 2012–13 July 2013, 01 October 2013–10 September 2014, 01 October 2014–23 April 2015, 23 June 2015–03 September 2015, 01 October 2015–01 October 2015, 02 November 2015–30 September 2016, 01 October 2016–30 September 2017, 01 October 2017–16 May 2018) and https://www.tbmm.gov.tr/develop/owa/yazili_sozlu_soru_sd.sorgu_baslangic (for Final Period Written and Oral Question Proposals Inquiry Form, which covers the general assemblies for the 27th Period (07 July 2018–25 July 2018, 01 October 2018–18 July 2019).

10 We did not collect data for AKP, as we focus on the behaviour of a far right party in a hybrid regime: As the ruling party, AKP already enjoys unlimited access to all traditional and digital media outlets, civil society organisations and state power to get its messages across Turkey.

11 https://chp.org.tr/; https://hdp.org.tr/; http://mhp.org.tr/mhp_index.php For a similar methodological approach, see Selçuk, Hekimci, and Erpul (2019).

12 On HDP’s website, some of the speeches and documents that mentioned Syrians lacked dates, so we tracked them on the internet.

13 It excludes HDP, which was not yet established.

14 We could not find any published statements by MHP for 2014 elections.

15 Data collection occurred on 25 November 2018 – 6 February 2019 through Google news, without any newspaper or source limitations and were analysed through big data methods. (Kavas and Düşündere 2019, 4–5).

16 Mülteciler Derneği (Refugees Association) (https://multeciler.org.tr/).

17 Such as referring to them as a part of ummah and Turkish people as ansar.

Additional information

Funding

The POWERS project is funded by the European Commission under the Erasmus+ Programme, Jean Monnet Activities, Jean Monnet Network for the period between 01-09-2018 and 30-06-2022 with a grant of 293,803.46 EUR. Project Reference is 599962-EPP-1-2018-1-RU-EPPJMO-NETWORK.