Why Turkey Is Authoritarian by Halil Karaveli

Author:Halil Karaveli
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)

The Clash of Liberal Populism and Capitalism

By the end of the 1950s Turkey was in political turmoil. The conservative government still enjoyed broad support in the countryside, but increasingly the urban population started to turn against it. Menderes responded with repressive measures that only deepened the crisis. Critical journalists were jailed, and newspapers were shut down. Police clamped down on protesting university students. The opposition was prevented from organizing rallies. İsmet İnönü, the former president, and other CHP politicians were attacked by pro-government thugs. The conservative party was becoming desperate as the tide turned against it: even though the DP had secured another election victory in 1957, it had lost significant ground to the opposition. The party responded by setting up an investigative committee in parliament that was charged with bringing criminal charges against members of the opposition. It was clear that Menderes, who had come to power promising freedom, had turned into an autocrat and was now bent on trying to establish a full-blown, authoritarian regime.

But Menderes was out of tune with the new societal dynamics, and his authoritarian ambitions were ultimately untenable. He faced the opposition of an urban coalition that comprised industrialists, intellectuals, state functionaries, students and workers. He was in trouble because the class coalition of urban and rural bourgeois interests that had sustained his party’s rise to power had split after only a few years. During the second half of the 1950s, the industrial faction of the Turkish bourgeoisie grew increasingly disgruntled with the agrarian economic populism of the DP.5 The DP’s economic policies privileged agricultural interests at the expense of the private industrial sector: while agriculture was supported with credit and tax breaks, industry was submitted to price controls and suffered from limits on credit. The conservative government also resisted the calls from business circles for national planning policies to aid industrial growth. What gave the DP its electoral advantage – the support of the peasantry – had become a trap: to retain its electoral edge, the party persisted with an agrarian economic populism that put it at odds with the interests of an assertive industrial class and with the increasingly vocal urban groups in society.

In 1946, the ruling CHP’s land reform bill had, as we saw, provoked the split in the party when the big landlords, aligned with the commercial urban bourgeoisie, rebelled against the bureaucracy; a decade later, the agrarian policies of the DP similarly precipitated a party split. This time, it was the urban bourgeoisie that took issue with the landlord interests that had come to dictate government policy. It called for a redistribution of state resources from agriculture to industry. Liberal populism was at an impasse because it had not synchronized with the evolving dynamics of capitalism in Turkey. But psychology and personality also contributed to the escalation of the crisis and to its tragic conclusion. Menderes was an emotional and impulsive, not to say unbalanced, man who seems to have come to believe that he enjoyed divine protection, especially after he survived a plane crash outside London in which several of his party colleagues died.

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