Turkey’s three-dimensional populism, three leaders and three blocs
Jailed presidential candidate for Turkey's pro-Kurdish opposition, Selahattin Demirtas, makes his first television appearance in over a year and a half on June 17, 2018. Depo Photos/Press Association. All rights reserved.
The upcoming presidential election in Turkey is
another interesting example of the global populist zeitgeist, albeit taking on
diverse forms in different countries in southeast Europe, the east
Mediterranean and the Middle East. Turkey has been subject to the power of the
right-wing conservative populist, Justice and Development Party (AKP) for the
last 16 years under the former football player Recep Tayyip Erdogan (who is in
some sense a charismatic leader).
The AKP’s hold on power has created a sense of
despair on the part of the opposition (similar to that during Thatcher’s years
in the UK with her claim that ‘there was no alternative’ to the neoliberal
order) until June 2013 and the emergence of the Gezi protest movement, which has
been compared to other grass roots (or square) movements such as occupy, the
anti-austerity movement and the Arab spring.
Gezi as an irregular, populist social movement
rejected the existing representative democracy by arguing that as the mass of
ordinary people, they were not represented by the elitist centre-right and
centre-left parties. Instead, the many components of the Gezi movement
synergized with the new Kurdish-led and left-leaning populist Peoples’
Democracy Party (HDP) that for the first-time afforded a real opportunity for
representation of not only a collective Kurdish political identity but other
excluded groups and brought 80 MPs into the Parliament in June 2015.
The HDP established a chain of equivalence between
its diverse components without essentialising Kurdish identity over other
alliances, using radical democracy as a common point of affiliation. The HDP
uses a different discourse than the orthodox pro-Kurdish political parties
through the charming left-wing populism of the human rights lawyer, Selahattin
Demirtas. He is one of the candidates for the presidency in the June 24, 2018
election but has been in prison for over a year facing a prison sentence of up
to 142 years on terrorism charges (plus four years for insulting Erdogan) while
approximately a hundred mayors of his HDP party have been replaced by
government-appointed trustees.
The discursive hegemonic approach of Ernesto Laclau
identifies populism as something that constructs the political in terms of the
people (the underdog) versus elites (the establishment) – although how populism
is deployed can either further or frustrate democratic ends. Interestingly, the
AKP as a party of the right successfully employed the discourse of ‘the People’
against the Kemalist status quo during the structural crisis of the regime,
emphasizing stability and development within a liberal democratic framework, a
policy of seeking EU accession and a neoliberal capitalist economy.
After some time in power, however, the AKP began to
define ‘the People’ in more religious, and recently more nationalist, ways. The
party, now acting as a new power elite, offered the rhetoric of creating a ‘new
Turkey’ by social engineering and tended towards a majoritarian and illiberal
political stance.
Within this authoritarian populist context, which
we might describe as post-political (where the state-centred policies of the
centre parties, both religious and secular, are hard to distinguish apart), the
Kurdish political movement realized that it was not enough simply to pursue the
demand for Kurdish national rights. Instead, the mainstream Kurdish political
agents (such as the Democratic Society Party and the Democratic Regions Party)
adapted a ‘progressive nationalism’ (similar to that of the Scottish National
Party that electorally replaced the Scottish Labour Party on the left) which reached
beyond regional politics and provided the ground for the HDP’s radical
democratic project (a project bearing a relationship to Podemos and Catalan
nationalism). This radical democratic bloc came to represent the demands of
diverse groups based on religion, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality as well as
economic minorities, in an inclusive left-wing populism.
The
CHP
In the upcoming elections, the main opposition
Kemalist secular Republican Peoples’ Party (the CHP and the founder party of
the Republic) are using an offensive strategy and promoting their MP Muharrem
Ince, a former physics teacher (who comes from a Sunni Muslim and leftist
background), as the candidate for the presidency.
Muharrem Ince speaks during a rally in Diyarbakir city, June 11th, 2018. Depo Photos/Press Association. All rights reserved.Ince’s humanitarian populist leadership
demonstrates a very successful social democratic populism. He personally
embraces the diversity of Turkish society and was even against removing
parliamentary immunity against prosecution for those HDP MPs accused of
promoting terror (namely a separate Kurdish national identity and
self-governance) even though his own party, the CHP, supported the AKP’s
decision to send them to trial which ended in a significant number of the HDP
MPs being arrested or fleeing the country.
Ince became a hope for the liberal supporters of
the CHP by reactivating the social democratic face of the party, although this
audience already had had similar experiences with Erdal Inonu’s Social
Democratic Populist Party (SHP) and Bulent Ecevit’s Democratic Left Party
(DSP).
Ince has started to develop a different discourse
and has hence promoted a sort of neo-Kemalist six pillars (republicanism,
populism, laicism, revolutionism, nationalism and statism) via an egalitarian
and libertarian interpretation of Kemalism for his fellow citizens, although
from this are excluded Syrian refugees who are accused of being supporters of
Erdogan and the backbone of a Salafi Islam as well as an economic burden for
the country. The problem here is the resulting ambiguity between the CHP’s
institutional/vertical politics and Ince’s individual/horizontal populist
leadership.
In the recent post-political situation two main
blocs have emerged. On the one hand, there is the Islamic-oriented AKP who have
created a de facto coalition in the name of a ‘public alliance’ with the
ultra-nationalist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and Great Unionist Party
(BBP). On the other hand, the secular CHP has joined with the Islamist Felicity
Party (SP) and the right-wing Good Party (IYI) (former MHP members) to assemble
a ‘national alliance’. Both pacts, particularly that led by the CHP, have ruled
out bringing the HDP (because of its Kurdish domination) into blocs dominated
by the Turkishnesss discourse of a homogenized citizenship, whether in an
Islamic or secular form.
Polarisation
and tension
The country’s politics and society are now
extremely polarized and tense. The government party has established a new
political frontier based on a division between us/friend (pro-AKP and support
for a one-man rule presidential system) and them/enemy (anti-AKP,
pro-parliamentarian democracy) which is different from the old we/they
distinction.
While the HDP’s position can be read as a Derridian
‘constitutive outsider’, the party has re-constructed an alternative political
frontier which is based on an ideology and philosophy that does not moralize
politics through the appeal to some sacred values not open to democratic
discussion (e.g. Muslimness and Turkishness).
Furthermore, the HDP has identified ‘we’, ‘the People’, in terms of an
agonistic pluralism that brings the conflict into the centre of politics via a
conflictual consensus and promotes compromise in disagreement (such as the
association between devout Muslims, Alevis, LGBTs, feminists and Afro-Turks and
non-Muslims) and one positioned within a symbolic democratic ground based on
the democratic principles of liberty and equality for all.
Choice of three?
The election is therefore offered a choice between
three blocs, each of which mobilises people in terms of a different type of
populism as expounded by their respective charismatic leader. However, if Ince,
in the way of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party, can manage to shift the CHP’s
establishment towards advocating a progressive and popular patriotism instead
of ethnic nationalism, especially in relation to the so-called ‘Kurdish
question’ and, moreover, if he can create a politics grounded on a new
hegemonic articulation, with a partisan nature (e.g. left and right) where economic
projects replace the prioritizing of state security over society, then this
could pave the way towards more social justice, popular sovereignty and the
democratisation of the political system.
This would also allow scope for the radical
democracy bloc to widen and deepen. This in turn might create an opportunity
for an agonistic negotiation that seeks to transform an antagonistic enemy (one
who needs to be eliminated) into an agonistic adversary (one with whom you can
negotiate on different concepts, such as democracy, citizenship, etc.). There
would be a chance to build an alternative society based on the diverse
collective identities of Turkey, a ‘national alliance’ constituted by a
dominant and extensive stratum of the Turkish society.
This new initiative could bring new hope for a
reconciliation with the Kurdish political groupings and a restoration of
democracy away from the current post-democratic system that suffers under
the state of emergency, decree law and a toxic demagoguery founded on
post-truth and anti-intellectualism.