Exit From Democracy: Illiberal Governance in Turkey and Beyond by Kerem Oktem & Karabekir Akkoyunlu

Author:Kerem Oktem & Karabekir Akkoyunlu [Oktem, Kerem & Akkoyunlu, Karabekir]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351381833
Goodreads: 43270959
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

Populism as the problem child of democracy: the AKP’s enduring appeal and the use of meso-level actors

Bilge Yabanci

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to explain the endurance of populist parties in power by focusing on the case of Turkey and the Justice and Development Party (AKP). The existing scholarly research on the AKP’s populism either focuses on the discourse and mediagenic performance of Erdoğan constructing an antagonism between ‘the people’ and ‘elites’ or equates populism with patronage politics. This study argues that in order to understand the AKP’s long-term appeal, populism should be theoretically decoupled from narrow approaches related to economic governance and treated as an essentially anti-pluralist set of ideas in a problematic relationship to democracy. Empirically, this article examines the government-dependent trade unions and women’s organizations in Turkey to understand how ruling populists shape extra-legislative fields. The findings show that the AKP expands the reach of populist antagonism between the people versus the elites through these organizations. Dependent organizations serve to reassert the AKP’s continuing relevance as the only genuine representative of ‘the people’, while transforming the labour and women’s struggle in line with the government’s agenda. They also keep newly arising social demands in check under democratic disguise while denying pluralism to civil society and entrenching undemocratic governance.

1. Introduction

The Justice and Development Party (AKP)’s affiliation with populism has recently become a shared feature of several journalistic pieces as well as an emerging body of literature on Turkey (Dinçşahin 2012; Erdoğan and Öney 2014; Müller 2014; Foreign Policy 2016; Tremblay 2016). These accounts mostly focus on the analysis of the AKP’s election slogans and the mediagenic performance of Erdoğan who skilfully utilises the Islamist–Secularist divide in Turkey in his defensive rhetoric against the imagined internal and external enemies of the nation.

The AKP leadership depicts the political arena as a fight between the party, ‘the only capable and reliable political brand to provide the nation with all sorts of goods’ including democracy and the rest ‘unconcerned with the wellbeing of the people’ (Çınar 2011, 122, 123). Erdoğan’s constant appeal to ‘the nation’ and ‘the people’, his use of catchy slogans like ‘national will’, ‘national power’ and ‘new Turkey’ against the elites of ‘old Turkey’ promote exactly the same antagonism pitting people against the elites, which lies at the heart of populism (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2013). Moreover, his personalistic and direct style places him on the side of Latin American populist leaders like Chavez, Morales and Correa (Weyland 2001; de la Torre 2013; Selçuk, 2016). These studies are valuable to understand Erdoğan’s leadership style and the discursive and performative aspects of AKP populism. However, they do not address how populism has shaped wider state–society relations, how it interacts with several collective social actors and how populist politics contributed to the illiberal and undemocratic turn of the regime under AKP hegemony.

Others link the AKP’s populism to its combination of a neoliberal economic outlook with clientelism as a vote buying strategy, defining the AKP as ‘a neopopulist party’. This literature maintains that while the AKP

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