Twenty Years of the AKP in Power in Turkey. Part 2: Electoral Hegemony and Democratic Rollback
The second part of the South European Society and Politics AKP retrospective aims to provide further understanding of the extraordinary electoral hegemony analysed in part 1 as well as to show how the party used its predominant position to undermine Turkish democracy.
Sources of the AKP’s long term electoral success include its strategies of grassroots mobilisation, the building of local clientele networks and the administration of social assistance, often based on charitable donations. Islamisation allowed the party to extend its reach into both society and the state, while claims about a shared religious lifestyle served to identify the party with the nation. The invocation of the family became fundamental to AKP discourse and to a gender policy defining circumscribed roles for women.
A critical moment of societal pushback in 2013 proved a turning-point. The spectacular unification of disparate popular demands proved transitory and the Gezi Park protests failed to build a sustainable opposition movement. Instead, the governing party cited them to build a counter-movement allegedly rooted in the ‘national will’. This legitimated a majoritarian perception of democracy, rapidly opening the way for a regime change to an executive presidency with limited accountability. The final articles in our collection examine the shrinking of the democratic space through the rollback of democratic reforms, the weakening of the rule of law and the capture of the media. These developments also marked the failure of European Union Enlargement to act as a democratic anchor.
Bringing together important articles from the South European Society and Politics archive, the collection seeks to offer insights into the consolidation and evolution of the AKP’s rule and its impact on the Turkish political system.
Edited by
Susannah Verney(National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece)
Anna Bosco(University of Florence, Italy)
Senem Aydın Düzgit(Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey)