The Transformation of Kurdish and Islamist Parties in Turkey: Consequences for Regime Change 3031062922, 9783031062926

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The Transformation of Kurdish and Islamist Parties in Turkey

Pelin Ayan Musil

The Transformation of Kurdish and Islamist Parties in Turkey Consequences for Regime Change

Pelin Ayan Musil Institute of International Relations Prague, Czech Republic

ISBN 978-3-031-06292-6 ISBN 978-3-031-06293-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06293-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Alex Linch shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

Turkey has recently experienced a regime change under the rule of the AKP government toward competitive authoritarianism. Much has changed within a period of less than two decades. Scholars now question the structural, institutional, agential and discursive dynamics that took the country to this path. The proposed book aims to contribute to this debate. Yet, rather than focusing on the longitudinal process of regime change within these two decades as some existing research did, I take a retrospective approach and re-analyze the three national elections (2002, 2007 and 2015) where the religious and ethnic parties thrived in Turkey. I question how they managed to succeed in elections (the AKP in 2002 and 2007 and the HDP in June 2015) keeping in mind that the country took an authoritarian turn afterward. These elections were providing significant opportunities for democratization of the Turkish regime: An Islamist-successor party (in 2002 and 2007) and a Kurdish-successor party (in 2015) reached record-high vote percentages while challenging the authoritarian-leaning state establishment in Turkey. How was this possible considering both the Kurdish and Islamist parties were once the anti-system parties of Turkey, especially in the 1990s when they were both subject to dissolution? I draw the attention to comparatively analyze these particular elections and the coalitions that these parties managed to build outside of their traditional constituency. How did they manage to receive the organized support of certain social groups prior to these elections? What kind of political contexts allowed these parties v

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PREFACE

to appeal to these groups? What were the motivations of these parties at that stage and how did these motivations affect the regime change? The novelty of this book lies in the comparative approach that it takes in understanding why the successor religious and ethnic parties were successful as well as its retrospective focus on these particular elections. The AKP’s electoral success was questioned several times by scholars at a time when the authoritarian turn in Turkey had not yet taken place. Following the authoritarian turn, the main questions focused on why and how the regime changed in this direction. But, asking the question of electoral success retrospectively in the aftermath of an authoritarian turn can shed light on why the opportunities for democratization failed: What were the problems of such opportunity structures that gave rise to these parties in the first place? In this book, I adopt a process-tracing approach, merging three different theories to build a causal mechanism that sheds light on how the Kurdish and Islamist parties were able to align with organized groups outside of their constituency. My main argument is that in a semidemocratic context where the repressive acts of the state such as banning parties or arresting politicians have been subject to a considerable degree of public criticism; ‘confronting the state’ becomes a salient issue during the elections. When these parties, as the main subjects of repression, manage to frame this salient issue as ‘an issue of democracy,’ they become the owners of the issue and receive organized support from social groups outside of their constituency. While a party’s ownership of the issue of democracy is a potential force for democratizing the regime, democratization is yet conditional on the motivation of the party: If the issue ownership is a consequence of an office-seeking behavior rather than a policy-seeking one, it is less likely to end up with democratization. Prague, Czech Republic

Pelin Ayan Musil

Acknowledgments

I had the idea of comparing Islamist and Kurdish parties in Turkey within a book project about four years ago. Despite the ideological distance between them, very different organizational structures and the contrasting power positions their successors have taken up in the Turkish regime, it was puzzling for me to observe the transformations that these parties went through. The Kurdish parties came a long way moving from the HEP to the HDP while the Islamist parties pulled away from the Milli Görü¸s tradition and transformed into the AKP. What is more, throughout these transformative processes, both parties have become electorally more successful and prosperous. Given that ethnic and religious questions have always been pressing issues in Turkish politics—including the antagonistic (and fluctuating) interactions these parties have had with the state—I have been asking: Is it possible to find some common mechanisms that enabled their transformation? If there are differences, what are they? And what is the relationship between the transformation of these parties and the Turkish regime’s path to authoritarianism? Thinking over these questions in the last few years, I have sided with the criticisms of the renowned center-periphery framework, used to understand Turkish politics and developed a three-stage causal mechanism that I present in this book. In the meantime, I have presented the application of this mechanism on Islamist parties in a number of conferences and seminars. Some of my preliminary ideas that overlap with the theoretical framework presented in this book have been published in journals Middle

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

East Law and Governance and Civil Wars. All in all, this book presents the most established form of the theoretical framework that I undertake in understanding party transformations and focuses on how these parties were able to receive the organized support of the social groups outside of their traditional constituency in certain moments. There are so many people to whom I owe thanks and gratitude not only during the writing process of this book but also during the time when my ideas started burgeoning. I presented my first paper on moderation theories and the ‘de-moderation’ of the AKP at the annual MPSA conference in 2018 where I received very constructive feedback from A. Kadir Yıldırım, whose scholarly work I had been following with admiration. During the time I was interviewing party activists in the summer of 2018, I also had intensive discussions with Menderes Çınar ˙ and Ipek Gencel Sezgin. I am indebted to these thought-provoking discussions and particularly to Menderes Çınar, whose scholarship has always been a major source of inspiration for me. I also had many fruitful conversations with Nazlı Senses ¸ and Kıvanç Özcan on Turkish politics almost every day during the time they hosted me for a one-month period in Ankara. Nazlı took me to Ba¸skent University, and Kıvanç introduced me to several political activists that he knew in Ankara. I am grateful to them; it is a blessing to have such friends. Jacob Maze, who accompanied me in my field research to Turkey was exceptionally helpful with the interviews conducted with the HDP and during this time, we had many debates on the evolution of the Kurdish parties in Turkey. I presented my initial findings from this research (on Islamist parties) at the ECPR panel in 2018, where I received many valuable comments from Hakkı Ta¸s, my friend and classmate from the Ph.D. program at Bilkent University. I owe many thanks to him as well as to the organizer of this panel, Clement Steuer, who is now my colleague with whom I work on different projects. What followed in 2019 was a series of presentations that I made on the question of ‘what went wrong with the theories of moderation.’ I delivered these presentations at the Department of International Relations at I¸sık University, Institute of International Relations in Prague and at a panel session on the Politics of Turkey at the MESA annual convention. Throughout these presentations, I received many refreshing comments from Ödül Celep, Rabia Karakaya Polat, Tereza Jermanova, Ebru Akcasu and the other participants that attended these panels. Coming from different disciplines, it has been very enlightening to exchange ideas with Ebru Akçasu on the complexities of Turkish politics. I also had many

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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stimulating conversations with Tereza Jermanova on the case study and process-tracing method, which have very much fed into this book. In the beginning of 2020, I started bringing together my written drafts, and merging the interview data that I had collected in the years 2007, 2011 and 2018 and began to write this book. I received valuable written feedback on the initial introductory chapter from my colleague, Lucia Najslova, to whom I am very thankful. The Institute of International Relations (IIR) in Prague provided an excellent environment for me while writing this book. I presented the book proposal and the first draft of my book’s introduction at IIR’s work in progress seminar where my colleagues gave me many worthwhile comments on how to improve. Most importantly, I want to thank Yunus Sözen who agreed to be my discussant in this seminar and read my introductory draft in detail. Later, Sebnem ¸ Yardımcı-Geyikçi and Sebnem ¸ Gümü¸sçü also read and commented on the first chapter of my book. I discussed the arguments of this book further with Hüseyin Alptekin, Ödül Celep and Toygar Sinan Baykan. All these colleagues and scholars, whose contribution to our current knowledge on Turkish party politics goes without saying, raised several important points about my arguments and helped me think very thoroughly. I am grateful to all who took the time to read and comment on my work! All errors are exclusively my own. In addition, I want to thank my interviewees, former and current party activists from the RP, FP, the AKP, the DTP, the BDP and the HDP, who had to sacrifice their time to talk to me. I kept all names and identities anonymous in this book. Finally, there is no way to describe my gratitude for my parents, my sister, my children and especially my husband Michal, who kept their patience and understanding for me during the time I was working on this book. The most intensive periods of writing coincided with Covid-19 and the lockdowns. I thank them for their lasting and unconditional support in such difficult times.

Contents

1

2

Comparing Ethnic and Religious Parties in Turkey 1.1 Research Design and Case Selection Criteria 1.1.1 Why Compare Ethnic and Religious Parties? 1.2 Theoretical Approach and the Main Argument 1.2.1 Issue Ownership Theory: A Connection Between the Theories of Moderation and Populism? 1.2.2 Consequences on Democracy 1.3 Data and Methods 1.4 Structure of the Book Bibliography

1 5 5 12

Comparing the Origins of the AKP and the HDP 2.1 Sources of Legitimacy of the Two Parties in the Political System 2.1.1 Turkish-Islam Synthesis (TIS) and the Rising Legitimacy of the AKP’s Predecessors 2.1.2 Desecuritization of the Kurdish Identity in the 2000s and the Rising Legitimacy of the HDP’s Predecessors 2.2 Party Goals: Vote, Office or Policy-Seeking? 2.2.1 The Birth of the AKP as an Office-Seeking Party 2.3 The Birth of the HDP Both as an Office and a Policy-Seeking Party References

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19 21 26 30 32

41 41

48 54 57 66 75 xi

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3

4

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CONTENTS

A Discursive Opportunity Structure to Confront the State 3.1 Turkey’s Europeanization Context as a Discursive Opportunity Structure for the AKP 3.2 The Gezi Context as a Discursive Opportunity Structure for the HDP References State Repression, Issue-Ownership and the Populist Surge: Comparing the AKP and the HDP 4.1 2002 National Elections and the AKP 4.1.1 The Conviction and Imprisonment of Recep Tayyip Erdo˘gan (1998–1999) 4.1.2 Formation of the AKP: A Party That Confronts the Injustices of the Turkish Political System 4.1.3 Support from the Kurds and Liberal Intellectuals for the AKP in 2002 Elections 4.2 2007 National Elections and the AKP 4.2.1 E-Memorandum of 27 April 2007 4.2.2 Court Decision on Presidential Elections on 1 May 2007 4.2.3 Support from the Kurds and Liberal Intellectuals for the AKP 4.3 2015 National Elections and the HDP 4.3.1 The HDP’s Framing of State Repression (2013–2015) 4.3.2 Support from the Socialist, Feminist and Environmental Groups 4.4 Summary References Conclusion: Consequences on Regime Change 5.1 Regime Change Toward Competitive Authoritarianism in Turkey Since 2007 5.2 Existing Explanations on the Collapse of the Turkish Democracy 5.3 The Office vs. Policy-Seeking Goals and the Regime Change After 2015 References

81 84 89 98 103 105 108

111 113 124 127 130 133 143 144 150 154 160 163 165 169 174 177

CONTENTS

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Appendix

181

Index

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About the Author

Dr. Pelin Ayan Musil is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of International Relations, Prague in the Czech Republic. She studied Political Science at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey (Ph.D., 2009) and at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary (M.A., 2005). Her research interests include political parties, regimes change and social movements with a focus on Turkey. Her single and co-authored articles have appeared in such journals as International Political Science Review, South European Society and Politics, Mediterranean Politics, Social Movement Studies, Turkish Studies, Middle East Law and Governance among others. She is the author of Authoritarian Party Structures and Democratic Political Setting in Turkey (Palgrave, 2011) and the co-editor of Party Politics in Turkey: A Comparative Perspective (Routledge, 2018).

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Abbreviations

AKP ANAP AP BDP CHP DBP DEHAP DEP DP DSIP DSP DTH DTK DTP DYP EMEP EU FP HADEP HDK HDP HEP HSYK IMF ISIS

Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi—Justice and Development Party Anavatan Partisi—Motherland Party Adalet Partisi—Justice Party Barı¸s ve Demokrasi Partisi—Peace and Democracy Party Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi—Republican People’s Party Demokratik Bölgeler Partisi—Democratic Regions Party Demokratik Halk Partisi—Democratic People’s Party Demokrasi Parisi—Democracy Party Demokrat Parti—Democrat Party ˙ sçi Partisi—Revolutionary Socialist Workers’ Party Devrimci Sosyalist I¸ Demokratik Sol Parti—Democratic Left Party Demokratik Toplum Hareketi—Democratic Society Movement Demokratik Toplum Kongresi—Democratic Society Congress Demokratik Toplum Partisi—Democratic Society Party Do˘gru Yol Partisi—True Path Party Emek Partisi—Labor Party European Union Fazilet Partisi—Virtue Party Halkın Demokrasi Partisi—People’s Democracy Party Halklarin Demokratik Kongresi—Peoples’ Democratic Congress Halkların Demokratik Partisi—Peoples’ Democratic Party Halkın Emek Partisi—People’s Labor Party Hakim ve Savcılar Yüksek Kurulu—High Council of Judges and Prosecutors International Monetary Fund Islamic State of Iraq and Syria xvii

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ABBREVIATIONS

KCK KO MÇP MHP MIT MNP MSP ÖDP ÖZDEP PKK PSOE PYD RP SDP SHP SP TAF TBMM TIS WTO

Koma Civaken Kurdistan—Kurdistan Communities Union Kurdish Opening Milliyetçi Çalı¸sma Partisi—Nationalist Task Party Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi—Nationalist Action Party ˙ Millî Istihbarat Te¸skilatı—National Intelligence Organization Milli Nizam Partisi—National Order Party Milli Selamet Partisi—National Salvation Party Özgürlük ve Dayanı¸sma Partisi—Freedom and Solidarity Party Özgürlük ve Demokrasi Partisi—Freedom and Democracy Party Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê—Kurdistan Workers’ Party Partido Socialista Obrero Español—Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party Partiya Yekîtiya Demokratîk—Democratic Union Party Refah Partisi—Welfare Party Sosyalist Demokrasi Partisi—Socialist Democracy Party Sosyal Demokratik Halkçı Party—Social Democratic People’s Party Saadet Partisi—Felicity Party Turkish Armed Forces Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi—Turkish Grand National Assembly Turkish-Islam Synthesis World Trade Organization

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 5.1

Causal mechanism of electoral success: A process-tracing approach Comparison of the 1991 and 1995 national election results in Kurdish-majority provinces Comparison of Mayoral Election Results in the Provinces within the Kurdish Political Region (1989–2014) 2002 Election results in the Kurdish political region 2007 Election results in the Kurdish political region Decline of democracy in Turkey according to V-Dem index (2002–2020)

22 47 70 120 120 166

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List of Tables

Table 1.1 Table 1.2 Table 4.1 Table 4.2 Table 4.3 Table 4.4

The list of ethnic and religious parties in Turkey Electoral support for the religious and ethnic parties: 1980–2015 National election in 2002: the performance of old vs. new parties The causal mechanism that turned the 2002 elections into an ‘Opportunity for Democratization’ The causal mechanism that turned the 2007 elections into an ‘Opportunity for Democratization’ The causal mechanism that turned the 2015 June elections into an ‘Opportunity for Democratization’

6 9 106 124 143 155

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CHAPTER 1

Comparing Ethnic and Religious Parties in Turkey

The goal of this book is to compare the ethnic and religious parties and emphasize the similar causal mechanisms that lead to their ability to receive organized support from diverse social groups in a single country context, which is Turkey. While political parties react to the political events in their environment and try to frame them in an electorally appealing way as part of their strategy, various social groups within the electorate interpret this ‘framing’ and vote accordingly. In this book, while I question why the ethnic and religious parties choose to frame certain events in a certain way, I also analyze what makes such framing successful on the ground, in a way that makes them more appealing to different social groups. In the end, I also discuss the implications of this process for democratization. This study merges the process-tracing method with a comparative case study approach. The electoral success of religious parties in general, and Islamist parties in particular, has attracted a great deal of attention in the literature. They have been compared with one another in different Muslim-majority contexts as well as with other religious parties and formerly communist parties. Yet, they were not really compared with ethnic parties. This could partly be because it is more debatable whether ethnic parties threaten the survival of democratic institutions, compared to the communist and the Islamist parties. The latter two, by the nature of their end goals, i.e. ‘a state founded on a set of Islamic principles’ © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Ayan Musil, The Transformation of Kurdish and Islamist Parties in Turkey, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06293-3_1

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and ‘a political system with common ownership and a classless society’ challenge the democratic order (Sokhey and Yildirim 2013, 232). The political implications of their success, which usually comes after a ‘moderation’ process, have been discussed extensively. Yet, ethnic parties also have the potential to create extreme bids and aggravate ethnic conflicts, while some can improve democratic consolidation through giving voice to the politically excluded ethnic groups (Ishiyama 2001; Ishiyama and Breuning 2011). In this book, I use the term ‘successor ethnic’ and ‘successor religious’ parties to refer to their electoral success for one main reason: Electoral success happens when these parties either renounce or transgress identity politics in the electoral arena. In the modern Turkish Republic, both the ethnic and religious parties have faced varying degrees of political exclusion in different time periods, yet they managed to thrive in national elections after transgressing their ‘ethnic’ and ‘religious’ identity. How and why this did happen? My main argument in this book is that in a semi-democratic context where the repressive acts of the state such as banning parties or arresting politicians become the subject of public criticism; ‘confronting the state’ becomes a salient issue. When these parties, as the main subjects of state repression, manage to frame this salient issue as ‘an issue of democracy,’ they become the owners of the issue and reach out to broader constituencies. These are significant moments that constitute ‘opportunities for democratization’ because a party’s ownership of the issue of democracy during an electoral period has the rare potential to mobilize the masses against the prevailing authoritarian practices in a regime.1 Democratization during these opportunities is yet conditional on the motivation of the party: If the issue ownership is a consequence of an office-seeking behavior rather than a policy-seeking one, it is less likely to end up with democratization. In this respect, this study stresses the mounting role of agency in shaping political outcomes during the presence of structural openings. In the Turkish context, the national elections in 2002, 2007 and 2015 constituted those structural openings and it was in these periods the agency choices became increasingly important for the direction of regime change. The successor ethnic party that I focus on in this study is the Kurdish-led party, which is named as the HDP (Halkların Demokrasi Partisi—People’s Democracy Party). I trace its sources of legitimacy; the context that helped the party to frame the state behavior as an issue of democracy and the way it reached out to various social groups by owning this issue. I then question why and how these frames were approved by

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these groups, which led to a record-high electoral result in the history of this party: the national election in June 2015. For the first time, a Kurdish-led party in Turkey surpassed the ten percent national electoral threshold, received 13 percent of the votes and attained 80 out of 550 seats in the parliament. Since the foundation of the first legal pro-Kurdish party in 1990, the HEP (Halkın Emek Partisi—People’s Labor Party), the nationwide vote percentage of the pro-Kurdish parties was ranging between four to seven percent. Due to a very high electoral threshold in the country, these parties were either unrepresented or underrepresented in the parliament prior to this election. This uncommon electoral outcome in June 2015 changed the power balance and ended the authoritarian-leaning dominant party system for a short while in Turkey. The successor religious party, whose electoral success I analyze in this book is the AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi—Justice and Development Party), which was founded in 2001 by the reformist faction of the Islamist Milli Görü¸s (National Outlook) movement represented by the RP (Refah Partisi—Welfare Party) and the FP (Fazilet Partisi—Virtue Party) in the 1990s. In the first election that it entered in 2002, the party gained 34 percent of the votes, achieved a swiping electoral victory against the existing parties and formed a single-party government. In 2007, it further increased its vote share to 47 percent. At the time of writing this book, the AKP continues to rule the country. Within 20 years, the party first established a predominant and then a hegemonic party system, initiated three referendums that significantly amended the constitution and changed the structure of the government from a parliamentary toward a presidential one. The 20-year-period of the AKP rule is also considered a regime change in Turkey toward competitive authoritarianism (Castaldo 2018; Esen and Gumuscu 2016). The changes in the institutional and political structure of the country through the successive electoral victories of the AKP are surely not separable from one another and have to-thisdate driven scholars to ask a complex set of interrelated questions rather than a single one: How was it possible for a newly founded party with a religious background to establish a strong single-party government after a decade of unstable, coalition governments? How was this even possible in a country where religious movements and parties were once forced underground through state control? Then, what enabled this party to continue its electoral resilience in a sequence of four terms? Finally, how did this electoral resilience turn into a hegemonic party system where it was possible to replace the parliamentary regime with a presidential

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one?2 These questions are fundamental for the comprehension of the process of de-democratization in a country, which happened in a relatively short duration, approximately 15 years, and was unpredictable for many students of Turkish politics when the party was thriving in 2002 and 2007 elections. Keeping these developments in mind, I take a retrospective position, turn the clock back and re-analyze the first and the second electoral victory of the AKP in 2002 and 2007, which set the ground for its authoritarian shift in later stages while in power. It is this period that I consider its comparison with the HDP in 2015 theoretically significant and enlightening. By the time the two parties were electorally rising, they were making it clear that they were no longer parties with ‘purely religious’ or ‘purely ethnic’ connotations. Indeed, in most of the scholarly research, the AKP is defined as a post-Islamist or an Islamist-successor party while the HDP is defined as a Kurdish-led, left-wing party rather than a pro-Kurdish one like its predecessors. Thus, while these parties were constructing their ‘new’ image with less emphasis on group identity and more on democracy, they were also doing so in a convincing way in these two elections. In 2002 and later in 2007, the support for the AKP extended to social groups that had other concerns than religion such as the liberal democrats and some segments of the Kurdish movement. In June 2015, the support for the HDP similarly reached out to non-Kurdish groups such as the marginalized feminist and ecological groups, the LGBTQs, religious minorities and the left-wing intellectuals. For sure, the criteria of success for these parties are not the same: As the result of an election, one party (the HDP in June 2015) had only gained a stronger presence in the national parliament, while the other (the AKP in 2002 and 2007) established a single-party government. However, it was in these three elections that both parties were able to receive the organized support of diverse social groups. By the term, electoral success, this book mainly refers to this political outcome, the ability to receive organized support from diverse social groups that alters the power balance in the regime. It was this political outcome that provided a significant opportunity (or structural opening) for democratization in each of the three elections in Turkey. The dual aim of this book is to shed light on how these opportunities had arisen and why they failed to bring a democratic change. Research questions: How were these parties able to convince and assemble different coalitions of supporters in these particular elections: November 2002 and July 2007 for the AKP and June 2015 for the HDP?

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Who were the new supporters of these parties and why did they support them? What were the motivations of these parties at these moments of electoral mobilization and how do they explain the failure of the opportunities for democratization? What are the theoretical lessons that may help us better predict the consequences of party transformation on regime change in a country with an unstable political system like Turkey?

1.1

Research Design and Case Selection Criteria

The primary virtue of the case study method is the prospect to study a single unit in great depth. Gerring, an important authority on the case study approach, states that ‘a cross-unit study might be satisfied to explain the occurrence of a revolution in Country A, while a case study of Country A might also strive to explain specific features of that event-why it occurred, when it did and in the way that it did.’ Yet, he also adds that ‘the utility of the case study method has little to do with the method itself and more to do with the state of current research in that field’ (Gerring 2004). Following this statement, rather than delving into the debates that compare the merits of the case study method with those of cross-case analyses in this section, I outline why this method—a comparative study of religious parties and ethnic parties combined with process-tracing—is needed in the state of current research, with reference to the studies on party politics and regime change in Turkey. 1.1.1

Why Compare Ethnic and Religious Parties?

The Turkish political context in different periods of its Republican history created many similar challenges for the Islamist and pro-Kurdish parties; which may lead us to expect similar strategies from both. For decades, party politics was ‘shaped’ to a great extent by a bureaucratic elite who considered themselves as the guardians of the Republic’s constitutional principles. Both parties were born as social movements in resource-poor, peripheral conditions. As Demiralp explains, the Islamist and the Kurdish movements in Turkey both represented a discontent of a rural ‘peripheral’ population in underdeveloped regions of Turkey that has remained excluded from the political, economic and cultural resources of the urban, industrialized center. The incapacity of the state in providing a fair distribution of political and economic resources between the center and the periphery turned the latter to a space of contention which led to the

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utilization of religion and ethnicity as the available resources that actors used to mobilize the contention (Demiralp 2007, 118). They transformed into political parties by utilizing the opportunities that exist in a semidemocratic setting such as competitive elections. As political parties, yet, they were perceived as challenging democratic consolidation by infringing the Constitution. The 1982 Constitution drafted within the framework of the military government that ruled the country from 1980 to 1983, aimed to ensure that political parties behaved in accordance with the founding philosophy of the Turkish Republic (i.e. Kemalism), which stressed the principles of a unitary, national and secular state (Güney and Ba¸skan 2008). The list of religious and ethnic parties in Turkey is shown in Table 1.1. The parties of the Milli Görü¸s movement, such as the MNP, the RP and the FP, were dissolved by the court for their ‘violation of secularism,’ whereas the pro-Kurdish parties such as the HEP, the DEP, ÖZDEP, DEHAP, HADEP and the DTP were dissolved fors ‘promoting territorial separation based on ethnic and sectarian lines’ and therefore ‘undermining the territorial integrity and national unity’ of Turkey. The political context particularly in the 1990 was friendly neither to the pro-Kurdish nor to the Islamist parties prior to the AKP’s seizure of power in 2002; which means that the challenges they faced were, to some degree, similar. This led some scholars to define the regime in Turkey as a ‘militant democracy,’ which relies on the defensive nature of the regime by constitutionalizing repressive measures against anti-system parties (Bourne and Bértoa 2017). Despite similarities, the ethnic and Table 1.1 The list of ethnic and religious parties in Turkey

Religious party

Year led

Year dissolved

MNP MSP RP FP SP* AKP* TP** HAS*** GP** DEVA**

1970 1971 1983 1998 2001 2001 2009 2010 2019 2020

1971 1980 1998 2001 − − 2012 2012 − −

(banned) (banned) (banned) (banned)

(merged with the AKP)

* Splinters of the FP, ** Splinters of the AKP, *** Splinter of the SP

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religious parties were rarely studied from a comparative perspective in Turkish politics, except for some noteworthy studies on party dissolutions (Belge 2006; Güney and Ba¸skan 2008; Kogacioglu 2004; Moral and Tokdemir 2017; Özbudun 2010). The reasons for the lack of a comparative approach could, yet, be the major differences in the origin, size, tactics and ideology of the two parties that I describe below: First, the AKP’s origin is in an Islamist movement whose strategy was nonviolent as opposed to the pro-Kurdish party, which was formed as an extension of an armed movement, the PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê—Kurdistan Workers’ Party). Established by a group of college students in the 1970s to challenge the coercive state policies based on discrimination and alienation among considerable segments of the Kurdish people, the PKK is known to pose the most serious challenge to the Turkish state since its foundation in 1923. The conflict between the PKK and the state has taken over 40,000 lives. Despite the asymmetric nature of the conflict and the strong Turkish state with a large military force, the PKK insurrection not only survived but also gave rise to many nonviolent political organizations at the local and national level, among which is the pro-Kurdish party that aimed to contentiously mobilize the society (Gürses 2018; Watts 2006). The Islamist Milli Görü¸s movement, in contrast to the Kurdish movement, has followed a ‘more cautious’ strategy in Eligür’s words: It is the clearest example of a noncivil social movement, utilizing conventional means with the goal of transforming a civil state into a noncivil one, in this case, redefining the secular-democratic structure in Turkey in accordance with a politicized form of Islam (Eligür 2010, 10). It either allied with center-right parties such as the AP (Adalet Partisi—Justice Party in the 1960s and the ANAP (Anavatan Partisi—Motherland Party) in the 1980s, or transformed into a new political party, starting with the MNP (Milli Nizam Partisi—National Order Party in 1970, the MSP (Milli Selamet Partisi—National Salvation Party) in 1972, the RP in 1983 and the FP in 1997). The Islamist insurgency is quite marginalized in Turkey and yet was visible in events such as the assassination of the prominent journalists and academics (i.e. Çetin Emeç in 1990, U˘gur Mumcu in 1993, Ahmet Taner Kı¸slalı in 1999 and others); the dreadful attack against the secularist-leftist intellectuals who were attending an Alawite religious festival in Sivas 1993 and the Islamic State-related Suruç and Ankara bombings in 2015 that targeted the leftist and pro-Kurdish

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groups. The Islamist political parties as well as the AKP organizationally and discursively remained distant from these insurgencies. This difference in the origin and tactics of the two parties—having a violent or a nonviolent background—is definitely important and as will be explained, a potential factor that affects the way the parties respond to changing contexts, their interaction with other political actors and electoral strategies. As Panebianco (1988, 50) explains, the characteristics of a party’s origin are in fact capable of exerting a weight on its organizational structure even decades later and ‘every organization bears the mark of its formation’ and ‘of … the decisions which “molded” the organization.’ The HDP’s ties with an armed movement led this party and its predecessors to relatively be the subject of higher levels of exclusion not only at the political but also at the social level, whereas the AKP was much more integrated into the society. In addition to origin, there is also a difference in the size and type of the two parties, which is related to the size of the traditional constituency that supported these parties. Even though party size is often measured through the number of party members (Tan 1998), it is hard to compare the size of the two parties through such numbers revealed in the official data from the Office of the Chief Public Prosecutor. Most importantly, the membership size of the HDP does not reflect the number of the Kurdish movement activists and the mass organizational characteristic of the party due to the security threats that the party has faced as a result of its link to an armed movement.3 On the other hand, a brief observation of the changing support rates of the two parties in the post-1980 context provides more or less an idea of the major difference in their size, showing that the Kurdish movement is much smaller than the Islamist movement (see Table 1.2). The difference in the size in a way shows that the pro-Kurdish party is closer to being a niche party, which is defined as ‘a party with a distinctive focus on a limited set of issues, which are beyond the traditional cleavage and are largely ignored by mainstream parties’ (Meguid 2005). Indeed, various empirical studies have shown the public visibility of the secularreligious divide among the party platforms in Turkey whereas the ethnic question is often marginalized (Bilgin 2018; Wuthrich 2013). Thus, the difference in the type and size of the two parties requires attention in explaining their success in reaching out to different social groups. The final difference worth considering is related to the ideology of these parties. Even though one party’s stress has been on ethnic concerns

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Table 1.2 Electoral support for the religious and ethnic parties: 1980–2015 Election year

Religious party

Support rate

Ethnic party

Support rate

1983 1987 1991 1995 1999 2002 2007 2011 2015 (June) 2015 (Nov) 2018

− RP RP RP FP AKP/SP AKP/SP AKP/SP AKP/SP AKP/SP AKP/SP

− 7.2 16.9 21.4 15.4 34/2 47/2 50/1.2 41/2 50/0.7 42.5/1.3

− − HEP* HADEP HADEP DEHAP DTP/Ind** BDP/Ind** HDP HDP HDP

− − − 4.2 4.8 6.2 5.2 6.6 13.1 10.8 11.7

* In this election, the HEP allied with the social democratic SHP and its candidates were included

on the SHP’s list. In 1992, these candidates resigned from the SHP and rejoined the HEP **In these elections, the DTP and the BDP supported independent candidates in the general elections to avoid the national electoral threshold.

and the other one on religion, they have positioned themselves on different sides of the left–right spectrum in the Turkish context. The left–right spectrum has not been fully adopted as an analytical framework for Turkish politics due to the saliency of identity politics and the secular-religious divide at least until the consolidation of the AKP’s power. Yet, there are studies showing that associate the Turkish right with conservatism, nationalism and Islamism in the socio-cultural dimension and neoliberalism on the socioeconomic dimension.4 The left on the other hand has been characterized with secular, progressivist values on the socio-cultural dimension and with social democracy on the economic dimension (Çarko˘glu 2007). The Kurdish movement, since its inception, has been loyal to the spirit of the left, inspired by Leninism and merged the Kurdish question with the nations’ right to self-determination (Yegen 2016). The first legal political party established in 1990 by the Kurdish movement, the HEP, in Bozarslan’s words, was ‘above all a Kurdish plus a left-wing party’ in the sense that it included issues like the fight for trade unions and women’s rights in its platform (Bozarslan 2012, 12). By 2015, the HDP was characterized as a ‘left-wing populist party’ that emerged as a ‘hope’ for the silent and angry society that the Turkish left could not earlier mobilize (Tekdemir 2019). On the other hand, while some have defined the Islamist RP of the 1990s as the ‘religious right’

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in Turkey (Yildiz 2003), the others argued that it confounded the left– right division, ‘relied on a multi-class political movement that articulated its themes in religious terms’ (Gülalp 2001, 434). Yet, having shifted from the Milli Görü¸s tradition and allied with the ‘devout bourgeoisie’ in central Anatolia (Gümü¸sçü 2010), the AKP also turned into a neoliberal, center-right party with a Muslim face (Co¸sar and Özman 2004). All in all, the difference in the ideological origins and demographic structure of the two parties—one being a niche party of the minority and the other being an Islamist party in a Muslim-majority society—should be noted when drawing comparative conclusions on how these parties broadened their support base. The process of democratization is not only shaped by the worldviews that the parties embrace but also by the ideological structure of the political center which may favor one worldview over the other. In Turkish politics, the right has historically been more advantageous than the left in attaining political power (Emre 2015). The differences in origin, tactics, size, type and ideology may at first glance be considered as a handicap to pursue a comparative analysis. However, it is these differences that can make the comparison more interesting and significant: Despite these differences, how were these parties able to own the issue of democracy and form an alliance with social groups outside of their constituency? In fact, such an alliance could easily put these parties in a dilemma with regard to their traditional ‘radical’ constituencies, as for instance Kumbaracıba¸sı (2009) argues in his detailed analysis of the AKP in the 2000s. Interestingly, both the AKP and the HDP, following their formation in 2001 and 2012, respectively, ended up with success in the first election they entered and were framed either as cases of ‘party moderation’ or ‘populism’ by the scholars who studied these parties in these periods.5 Second, how is the fact that both parties that once shared the features of an ‘anti-system party’ and yet ended up with two different outcomes is also worth consideration particularly to understand the regime transition in Turkey.6 The electoral success of the AKP ended up with this party’s ‘conquering the state’ (Somer 2017) and the electoral success of the HDP ended up with its own repression, this time under a ‘new political center’ created by the AKP government. What role did their motivations play in these different outcomes and make the country witness the worst measures of democracy since the 1980–1983 military government? Focusing primarily on the post-1980 context in Turkey, which is shaped by an ideology-based jurisprudence of the Turkish Constitutional

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Court on these parties (Özbudun 2010), this book thus uncovers the differences and similarities between these parties often neglected in the literature, and makes them the subject of an analytical study. Through my selection of cases, while I am inspired by Mill’s methods of difference and methods of agreement, it is probably evident that I do not firmly stick to its rules for the purpose of this study. Mill’s methods are convincingly criticized for being unable to deal with interaction effects and outcomes generated by more than one causal variable (Lieberson 1994). For instance, while it is possible to expect a set of similar reasons for the electoral appeal of ethnic and religious parties to different social groups chosen in a single context, the different processes that enable these similar outcomes are equally theoretically significant for understanding their long-term effect on the development of democracy. Thus, I rather choose to complement this comparative method with the merits of the theory-centric process-tracing method, which is used when ‘we know an outcome, but are unsure about the causes’ (Beach and Pedersen 2013, 16). Instead of just asking whether a cause and an outcome were present, process-tracing enables the researcher to ‘get inside the box of causation’ by theorizing and testing a causal mechanism (Gerring 2008). Such mechanisms contain theoretical expectations about how the cause translated into the observed outcome. Thus, by tracing the causal chain in a given case, the researcher can make stronger claims about causality in a single case. In the next section where I discuss my theoretical framework, I discuss two bodies of literature related with the rise of ethnic and religious successor parties in Turkey: Theories of party moderation and theories of populism. Interestingly, as I noted earlier, despite being the focus of separate analyses, the scholars have outlined both the Kurdish-successor HDP and the Islamist-successor AKP as ‘cases of ideological moderation’ on one side, as ‘cases of populism’ on the other. This implies two things: First, there must indeed be a causal mechanism common to the electoral success of both parties that needs to be revealed. Second, the fact that ‘ideological moderation’ and ‘populism’ are two very different concepts and yet are both used to refer to these parties implies that there must also be a connection between the two concepts. The theoretical framework that I present below thus critically discusses these two bodies of literature and produces a causal mechanism that makes that connection.

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1.2 Theoretical Approach and the Main Argument The existing research that studied the electoral success of the ethnic and religious parties in general and the pro-Kurdish and Islamist parties in Turkey (often separately) have mainly utilized the theories of party moderation and most recently populism. In this section, I first discuss why focusing solely on these theories cannot sufficiently explain the electoral of ethnic and religious parties in a semi-democratic setting that have been biased against these parties. Then, I present the issue ownership theory as one that could connect these theories with its ability to bridge the macrodynamics under which these parties operate with the micro-dynamics that helped the parties gain support from different social groups. Utilizing the process-tracing approach, I then build a causal mechanism among the three theories that can provide an in-depth explanation for the outcome of the electoral success of ethnic and religious parties (or their ability to receive organized support from diverse social groups during an election). Chapter 4 of this book will be based on empirically demonstrating this causal mechanism after identifying the party goals and scope conditions of such electoral success in the preceding chapters. Theories of Moderation: The core idea of party moderation (in ideological terms) implies a party’s embracement of open worldviews, peaceful competition, cooperation and compromise with other actors (Schwedler 2011). Moderation as a process is closely related with the electoral success of ethnic or religious parties as it implies the transformation of their narrow focus on identity politics toward a plurality of democratic concerns into their platform. This is analogous to Duverger’s (1954) explanation of the transformation of niche parties into catch-all parties. The inclusionmoderation thesis argues that inclusion in democratic institutions creates electoral incentives that provide various opportunities for the ideologically rigid parties to moderate. Many communist parties after 1989 went through this process as they were ‘faced with the necessity of altering themselves from essentially instruments of social, economic and political control to electorally competitive parties’ (Ishiyama 1995, 147). In the case of Islamist parties, Kalyvas similarly argues that, just like any other ideologically rigid party operating in the context of elections, they gradually emancipated from their doctrine because of ‘the strategic pursuit of interests under certain institutional conditions’ (Kalyvas 2000, 296). Some strategic electoral tactics of Islamist parties for instance have been

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the establishment of new linkages with the constituencies of centrist parties (Ocakli 2015), building coalitions with secular-nationalist parties (Buehler 2013) or cooperation with former political rivals (Schwedler 2007). In the case of ethnic parties, the inclusion-moderation approach translates into ‘centripetalism’ as an institutional model for ethnic conflict management, which is found in the original works of Horowitz (2000, 2008). He similarly argues that the use of electoral rules will require political leaders to make cross-ethnic appeals in order to get elected; making the political support come from various quarters, not simply from the dominant group. This approach has yet suffered from major problems such as disregarding the internal party dynamics, the nature of party ideology, the overall context of competition and electorates’ decision-making processes.7 The overemphasis that the theory makes on institutional constraints and the parties’ exposure to alternative views creates a reduced understanding of inclusion. Schwedler’s (2006) study of the successful moderation of the IAF in Jordan, compared to the unsuccessful case of the Islah party in Yemen in fact shows that the extent of public political space provided by the regime to Islamist parties in electoral competition mattered more than simply being included in electoral competition. Seconding this view, Driessen (2012) also calls for a broader understanding of inclusion, meaning ‘not only an offer of electoral participation by the state, but also the greater range of governmental favoritism towards religion which maintains, increases, or encourages a greater public role for Islam in the national life of society.’ With regard to ethnic parties, the empirical evidence has also suggested that rather than being included in electoral processes, it is their integration in government coalitions as found in consociational models that matters more for a long-term moderation (Ishiyama 2001; McCulloch 2013). On the other side, many point to the importance of the position of the state vis-à-vis these parties in addition to electoral institutions. If the participation of these parties in electoral institutions takes place within the framework of a state with an uncompromising or repressive attitude, then it possibly creates a different dynamic for their transformation. On Islamist parties, Tezcür (2010b, 75) argues that ‘the greater the threat of state repression, the more cautious and risk-averse are the Islamist party actors.’ For instance, in the case of Ennahda in Tunisia, the state used a large scale of imprisonment and exile for the party’s leading activists (Cavatorta and Merone 2013). In the case of Iran, the state disqualified

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many candidates of the Islamist RP from running in elections and banned the publication of party documents (Tezcür 2010a, 77). These studies imply that if there are such negative incentives initiated by the repressive state on a party—either religious or ethnic one—then the party may find itself in a position to primarily think of its political survival and moderate. ‘Their moderation’ in this way can give clear signals to the state that the party is no longer an internal security threat to the political system (Cinar 2006, 473). Thus, the quest for survival has the potential to make these parties politically learn to suppress their ideas related to group identity. However, the approach focusing solely on the role of the state also has its own problems. First, what if the state itself has undemocratic attributes? These parties may learn to suppress their ideas on identity politics but can they equally learn to be moderate actors if the state itself is not moderate (Somer 2014)? Second, just like the inclusion-moderation thesis singularly focuses on a narrow understanding of ‘inclusion’ and is criticized accordingly by scholars, the approaches that prioritize the role of the state seem also to be only concerned with the concept of ‘exclusion’ imposed by the state. Yet, what happens to the parties that operate in a context that incorporates both of these factors at the same time? In contexts where the repressive acts of the state coincide with inclusion in electoral politics and inter-party competition, it could rather be the synergy between ‘the inclusion in electoral competition’ and ‘the exclusivist approach of the state’ that can shape political processes, including moderation. On the one hand, the party copes with the repressive acts of the state, yet on the other, it competes with other parties to appeal to the masses and maintain access to power. Even though many studies have framed the AKP and the HDP of Turkey as cases of ‘moderation’ since both parties formed coalitions with different social groups and transgressed the identity politics that their predecessors were promoting, these studies did not really address the potential synergy that can be produced by these factors. An exception is, for instance, Altinordu (2016), who refers to the success of the AKP in Turkey due to its ability to mobilize the constituents that have been excluded from the social and political center or Eligur (2010, 261–274), who similarly talked about the successful mobilization of the AKP against the secular state in elections. On the Kurdish-successor party, some have noted that despite its strategy to appeal to non-Kurdish voters for a certain period of time, the HDP’s clear emphasis on the authoritarian policies of the AKP government and its opposition against the AKP’s

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project on building a presidential system has what made this party thrive around 2014 presidential elections and the June 2015 general elections (Grigoriadis 2016; Kaya and Whiting 2019, 101). In short, while moderation theories acknowledge the importance of electoral institutions and the role of an uncompromising state in leading the ethnic and religious parties toward electoral success, they do not set a clear causal link between how the party reacts to the repressive acts of a state and how different electoral groups interpret this reaction against such a state. On the latter point, the theories of populism provide more noteworthy insights than the moderation theories. That is why, in the next section, I turn my attention to the populism literature. However, two additional things need to be addressed with regard to the moderation literature, which explains why I refrain from using the concept of ‘moderation’ when referring to the electoral success of ethnic and religious parties in this study: First, there is a fundamental problem in putting the transformation of pro-Kurdish and Islamist parties in the same category as ‘ideological moderation.’ In her latest review, Tepe (2019, 10) concludes that ‘for comprehensive ideological moderation to take place, parties need to alter their core commitments and ideas by bringing them closer to the political center, if such center exists, but they also need to incorporate more democratic or inclusive ideas.’ According to this definition, which is reflective of the general conceptual tendency in the literature, one cannot treat the transformation of the pro-Kurdish and Islamist parties in Turkey in the same conceptual way. The HDP managed to retain a high degree of radicalism relative to other parties competing in the Turkish party system while bringing together a coalition of different supporters (Kaya and Whiting 2019, 101). On the other hand, the AKP’s coalition of different supporters in the 2002 and 2007 elections happened as a result of moving to the center, capitalizing on the failures of the center-right parties during the 1990s (Co¸sar and Özman 2004). It is even problematic to call the HDP an ideologically moderate party since its main goal has been to change the constitutional order while continuing to have links with an armed movement. The second problem with using the term, ‘moderation,’ lies in the difficulty to distinguish whether the change happens in ‘party image’ or in ‘party identity.’ Ideological moderation (change in identity) vs. behavioral moderation (change in image) is a continuous subject of discussion in the literature, but all in all, it is difficult to evidence the difference. Gürses (2014), through interviews and surveys with party activists, has

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once found that the AKP’s support for democracy was fragmented, provisional and driven by pragmatism more than a principled commitment to democratic norms and values. Sözen (2008) has also argued that while Turkey was transiting out of its tutelary democratic regime in the early period of the AKP government, it was rather moving toward electoral authoritarianism rather than consolidating its democracy. These findings or arguments, however, still do not prove that the moderation of the Turkish Islamists was ‘behavioral’ upon the foundation of the AKP. This discussion in a way shows the ‘normative bias’ in the moderation literature desiring Islamists to moderate, as Schwedler (2006) has once asserted. While the theory’s causal dynamics based on the role of a repressive state and democratic institutions can be quite important for the understanding of how ethnic and religious parties appeal to broader constituencies, the concept of moderation itself is often used in a biased way and its empirical referents are not fully established. Hence, understanding the political consequences of a process of party transformation—often understood as ‘moderation’—needs separate theoretical frames. Theories of populism: Based on the theories of moderation, I have so far emphasized that an integrated approach toward the role of the state and democratic institutions can better explain how ethnic and religious parties can bring together different coalition of supporters in elections. In fact, the way they choose to react or frame the ‘repressive state acts’ in competitive elections can influence the political preferences of certain social groups that may choose to ally with these parties. The theories of populism provide complementary insights with regard to who these social groups can be and why they make such choices. As another loaded term, populism has been conceptualized and studied through three main approaches, such as a ‘political strategy,’ a ‘political style’ or a ‘set of ideas.’ The latter one, which is known as ‘the ideational approach to populism’ has yet become the dominant approach in the literature and studies populism as a ‘discourse’ or as a ‘thin ideology’ (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2018; Pirro and Taggart 2018). This approach is also associated with the demand side of populism rather than the supply side of it and aims to understand how and why the constituencies with different characteristics or demands can be mobilized around one powerful force. As my primary goal is to merge the macro-dynamics of the party-state interaction I discussed above with a micro-dynamic demandside approach, I also utilize this ideational approach to populism in this book.

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The conceptual core of populism as a set of ideas is ‘the pitting of a virtuous and homogeneous people against a set of elites and dangerous “others” who are together depicted as depriving (or attempting to deprive) the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity and voice’ (Albertazzi and McDonnell 2008). While the elites are neither virtuous (they never can be, in fact) nor necessarily homogeneous, the ‘people’ of the populist discourse—an ‘imagined community, much like the nation of the nationalists’ are, by necessity, both (Mudde 2004). It is symmetrically opposed to elitism in the sense that elitism believes ‘people are dishonest and vulgar, while the elite are superior in cultural, intellectual and moral’ (Akkerman et al. 2014, 152). It is also the opposite of pluralism since pluralism assumes that societies are composed of several social groups with different ideas and interests. The idea of populism, instead, is based on a moral distinction between a homogeneous people and the elite (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2018, 152). A massive driving force that gives rise to a populist discourse among political leaders, parties or the media is the citizens’ ‘perception of a lack of representation’ by traditional democratic institutions such the elections and political parties (Taggart 2000). The popular dissent with the way the existing institutions work turns into a lack of trust, which slowly ends up with complete mistrust in the whole political establishment (Katz and Mair 2018). In many post-communist democracies, for instance, popular dissent has been triggered by the disappointments in the transformation process reflected on issues related to European Union (EU) membership and corruption (Pirro 2014). Indeed, the rise of populism is strongly associated with the levels of perceived corruption of existing politicians as well as the international actors. In either case, the mistrust triggers the hopes that populists will revitalize the political system (Hawkins et al. 2017). Laclau’s discussion of the inability of the institutional system to absorb the plurality of unsatisfied demands as a precondition of populism is particularly enlightening here: While the institutional arrangement is usually built on a logic of difference and meets the demands of different demands in a society, in a social situation where these different demands cannot be met, they re-aggregate themselves, which he calls, the ‘logic of equivalence.’ Even though each demand is constitutively split, based on its own particularized self, through ‘equivalential links,’ it merges with the totality of other demands. Thus, while each particular demand is a democratic subject in itself, the ‘equivalential aggregation’ of a plurality

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of these demands will transform into a popular subject (Laclau 2005, 37). Indeed, the more social demands tend to be differentially absorbed into the institutional system, the more unlikely the constitution of such a popular subject. Thus, it is the co-existence of the plurality of unsatisfied demands on the one hand and an increasing inability of the institutional system to differentially absorb them on the other that creates the precondition of a populist rupture. This rupture then divides the society into two camps—power and the underdog (Laclau 2005, 38). Yet, representing a ‘highly heterogeneous reality’ in the form of an ‘equivalential homogeneity’ is possible only at the discursive level, according to Laclau. That is why a populist rupture requires an ‘empty signifier,’ which carries out such a homogenizing function (Laclau 2005, 42). An empty signifier gives coherence to the plurality of demands by signifying it as a totality while it has the ability to divide the society into two camps. This is in a way similar to the expectations that a populist discourse needs an alignment with a certain ideology, which depends on the aspects of its political environment that resonate with ‘the heartland’ (Taggart 2000). The theories of populism have recently gained a lot of attention for analyzing the developments in Turkish politics, which also includes the electoral success of the AKP in the 2000s and the HDP in 2015. Both parties have been referred to as examples of ‘populist parties:’ Following the major financial crisis in 2001, the students of Turkish politics characterize the discourse of the electoral campaigns of 2002 as being dominated by ‘economic populism’ (Aytaç and Öni¸s 2014; Öni¸s and Keyman 2003, 96; Sayari 2007, 200). In this environment, the AKP emerged as a party that merged populism with a conservative ideology. The AKP party leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan had served as the mayor of Istanbul for seven years and had already established a ‘strong sense of identity with the common people, especially the urban poor’ (Aytaç and Öni¸s 2014; Çelik and Balta 2018; Sayari 2007, 202). Unlike the parties of center that had earlier formed various coalition governments, the AKP was new, untried and untainted with revelations of political corruption. The party campaign was built on such populist ideas that the existing parties had failed to represent the interests of the religious masses and were oppressive and elitist (Yabanci 2016, 9). Baykan argues that it was such populism embraced by the AKP that helped the party to overcome the reactions of the secularist elite competitors embedded in the establishment.8

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On the other hand, the HDP during the 2015 national elections is described as a left-wing populist party with a focus on radical democracy as it offered a political alternative to the strict ‘conservative, religious and neoliberal wing[s]’ that dominated the political establishment since the 1980s, that was reinforced by the AKP regime (Arikan Akda˘g 2016; Tekdemir 2016, 655–656). The HDP further capitalized on the representative void left in the wake of the Gezi protests and was trying ‘to gently bleed’ issues pertaining to Kurdish rights into ‘Turkey’s political mainframe’ (Cavanaugh and Hughes 2015, 7), while also rising as an alternative left hegemonic project against the neoliberal authoritarianism that the AKP government represented (Kaya 2019). While theories of populism provide important insights into how a populist force can help bring together an alliance of different groups during electoral competition, they do not really explain when such a force is likely to emerge and why certain actors have more power to create this force than others. For instance, why did these particular parties in Turkey, the ones with a religious and ethnic origin, emerge as attractive contestants that could represent ‘the virtuous masses’ versus ‘a corrupt and an oppressive elite’ in particular contexts? In the following section, I introduce the issue ownership theory, which connects the theories of moderation with that of populism. I show that as long as a non-neutral state creates short-term salient issues through a practice of repressive acts and as long as these parties, as ‘victims’ of these acts, publicly frame them as ‘an issue of democracy,’ their long-term associative ownership of religion and ethnicity diminishes in a particular election. Instead, a shortterm competence ownership of the issue of democracy rises that can bring together diverse groups of organized support for these parties. 1.2.1

Issue Ownership Theory: A Connection Between the Theories of Moderation and Populism?

Having reviewed the theories on moderation and populism, in this section, I present a new causal mechanism using the issue ownership theory as a connection between moderation and populism theories. Issue ownership means that the voters perceive some parties as being more capable of dealing with certain public issues than others. In other words, the party that is most strongly linked to a given issue by the voters is said to ‘own’ the issue (Petrocik 1996). The theory of issue ownership is used to explain party behavior—i.e. why a party chooses to focus on certain

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issues in its public rhetoric and voting behavior—i.e. how the perception of a party’s issue ownership affects voting behavior (Walgrave et al. 2012). The salience of an issue on public agenda, thus, potentially increases the votes of the parties that are considered to be associated with that issue. Walgrave et al. distinguish two types of issue ownership: Competence issue ownership (CIO) which refers to parties that are considered to be the most competent to deal with an issue and associative issue ownership (AIO) which refers to parties that are spontaneously identified with issues in the minds of voters, regardless of whether they are considered to be the most competent to deal with these issues (Walgrave et al. 2012). Budge (2015) further argues that some parties can establish the ownership of a new issue in each election while some others are tied to particular issues over many elections. Thus, the electoral success of these parties depends on whether their issue comes up in a particular election and whether the electors’ time perspective is limited to short-term election campaigns, or to long-term assessments of those parties. The issue ownership theory thus provides an excellent framework for understanding the changing forms of party behavior of ethnic and religious parties as it takes into account the electorate demands, the position of rival parties as well as the publicly salient issues around which the elections take place. In a hybrid electoral context in which the party is both included in electoral competition but at the same time subject to the negative incentives sent by a repressive state, the ethnic or the religious party often has to choose a certain electoral strategy and decide which ‘issue’ to emphasize. The religious parties are usually associated with the issue of religion (or Islam in Muslim-majority contexts) and the ethnic parties are associated with the rights of the ethnic minorities according to the long-term assessments of the voters (AIO). Yet, they may establish the ownership of another short-term issue in a particular election and show that they are competent to deal with it, such as confronting a repressive state, which is ‘an issue of democracy’ (CIO). Indeed, the existence of such a state may create a salient issue during particular elections and mobilize the critics and victims of the state under the leadership of these parties just as Laclau’s theory of populism predicts. There is yet an alternative choice for these parties, which is to avoid publicly referring to the state as an issue of democracy. The party leadership may choose this option in order to prevent a potential conflict with the state, so as to protect its own survival. Thus, I hypothesize that the former strategy, confronting the state, is likely to take place under a certain scope condition, i.e. when

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there is a discursive opportunity structure for the party to confront the state. This may be a time period when the system provides an opportunity for certain political frames to be effective in mobilizing collective action. As long as the repressive acts of the state, such as military interventions, banning parties or arresting politicians, are considered legitimate by the majority of the population, ownership of the issue of ‘confronting the state’ is likely to fail as an electoral strategy for these parties. In the case of the AKP, the Europeanization process in Turkey had already established a context where the political acts of the Court and the military were subject to a large-scale public criticism. The HDP, on the other hand, was able to criticize the AKP’s undemocratic policies in the opportunity structure created by the Gezi resistance, which was a largescale social movement that challenged the AKP in power. These discursive opportunity structures will be explained in the third chapter of this book. Thus, as long as the ethnic or the religious party chooses to confront the state stressing its exclusivist, anti-democratic actions in an electoral campaign, it turns into a party that becomes the competent owner of the issue of ‘democracy,’ putting aside its associational ownership of the issue of religion or ethnicity. This is what helps the party to gain the electoral support of a heterogeneous group of voters. Figure 1.1. illustrates the causal mechanism discussed in this section. This book uses this theoretical scheme to explain the rising electoral support for the AKP and the HDP in the Turkish elections of 2002, 2007 and 2015, respectively. 1.2.2

Consequences on Democracy

The causal mechanism (see Fig. 1.1) that I derived from the theories of moderation, issue ownership and populism shows how religious and ethnic parties with anti-system features can expand their traditional constituency by allying with diverse social groups with grievances resulting from a repressive state ideology. In this section, I briefly elaborate the implications of this mechanism on the development of democracy, which will more broadly be discussed in the fifth concluding chapter of this book. Without such a discussion, it would not be clear why building coalitions with different social groups matter in a semi-democratic setting. In this book, I argue that while a struggle initiated by the successor ethnic and religious parties against a repressive state turns into an ‘issue of democracy’ as perceived by the social groups who ally with the party, this issue does not necessarily produce the building of a democratic

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Scope condition: Discursive opportunity structure for the party to confront the state Part 1 Causal trigger based on moderation theories: The state acts in a repressive way in a setting where parties are included in elections.

Part 2 Causal trigger based on issue ownership theory: The party confronts the state and owns the ‘issue of democracy’

Part 3 Causal trigger based on Laclau’s theory on populism: Plurality of unsatisfied social demands unite under this issue.

Outcome: Electoral success (The party receives the organized support of diverse social groups.)

Fig. 1.1 Causal mechanism of electoral success: A process-tracing approach

regime. Building a democratic regime depends on the motivations of these parties in creating their alliances rather than the alliances themselves. On this argument, I side with the criticisms against the frequent and naïve usage of Mardin’s center-periphery framework on Turkish politics. Mardin’s ‘Center-Periphery Relations’ draws upon the notion that society has a center held together by a complex network of political, economic and cultural institutions and a periphery whose integration to the center constitutes a fundamental social and political problem (Mardin 1973). Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Kemalist leadership’s effort to establish a new center at the formation of the Republic reproduces the view of the periphery as the locus of primordialist religious identities and ethnic separatism. This duality is then reinforced by the claim that the CHP (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi—Republican People’s Party) represented the ‘bureaucratic’ center and the DP represented the ‘democratic’ periphery. While Mardin’s framework, being the subject of various criticisms, has fostered an important debate in the field, my goal here is not to repeat these criticisms,9 but rather side with those who criticize the binary reading of history based on normative projections (Bakiner 2018, 511).

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While the ethnic and religious parties have generally been considered part of the ‘democratic’ periphery, neither have their supporters shown a consistent voting behavior nor has the relationship between the two been marked by cooperation. Besides, there is a big problem in equating their struggle as ‘democratic,’ by purely observing their success in challenging the center, which cannot be ‘a source of evil independent of the agents who comprise it’ (Bakiner 2018, 516). Democracy requires, as noted by Przeworski, that conflicting political forces obey the results of voting, no matter they lose or win (Przeworski 2005). While it is never certain to foresee whether the successor ethnic or religious party will obey the results when it loses the elections similar to the time it prospers, a close examination of the party origin, which shapes its motivation and behavior during the elections, may provide important clues on whether it will do so or not. I argue that if the successors of religious and ethnic parties are born with an ‘office-seeking ’ goal vs. a ‘policy-seeking’ goal in a regime that has systematically excluded their predecessors from politics, it is more likely that their pro-democratic struggle in elections does not bring democratization when they are in office. In advanced democracies where elections are regulated by neutral state institutions with equal distance to each party, parties are known to pursue three types of goals: vote-seeking, policyseeking and office-seeking. A vote-seeking party is one that originates from Downs’ original work on electoral competition where parties are treated as vote maximizers and party ideology is only a means to power (Downs 1957). An office-seeking party is one that seeks to maximize not its votes but its control over the office, which provides private benefits to the party as part of its appointment in governmental positions. The policyseeking party is one that aims to maximize its effect on public policy and is concerned about the ideological dispositions that shape government portfolios (Strøm 1990). In this book, I will show that the AKP is a party born primarily with an office-seeking goal. As the second chapter will discuss in detail, even though the formation of the AKP brought together diverse voices and certain figures with policy-oriented ideals within the party umbrella, ideological incoherence among the rank-and-file and the party leadership, its prioritization of effective governance over a programmatic ideology and a leader-dominant organizational structure overall signified that the AKP was born more as an office-seeking party than a purely voteseeking or policy-seeking one. During the factional divide between the traditionalists who were supporting the Islamist party leader Necmettin

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Erbakan in the late 1990s, the reformists had become united around the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The party under the leadership of Erbakan was in office as a major coalition partner in 1995 and was electorally already on the rise. Yet, when the party suffered from a major electoral setback as a result of the state intervention on February 28, it caused the intensification of the factional divide in the party. Erbakan was criticized for not being able to cope with the military intervention, which cost the party’s elimination from ‘office.’ As my interviews show, Erdogan and his supporters were inclined to take the party back to the route of ‘success’ and the country to the route of ‘effective governance’ after the experience of a major economic crisis. This is in parallel with the literature’s emphasis that the AKP’s ‘ideological moderation’ was more based on ‘pragmatism’ (Gümü¸sçü 2010; Tepe 2005) and that the AKP leaders struggled to find an ideology for their party at the beginning (Yenigun 2017). The same chapter will also discuss how the HDP was born with an office-seeking goal in the eastern region of Turkey dominates the electoral competition in many provinces and controls several local offices but at the national level has a (meta)policy-seeking goal, where it has allied with new social groups during the elections. The HDP was born in 2012 as a result of what the party activists call ‘a struggle for becoming more Türkiyeli,’ which relates to moving toward a territorial rather than an ethnic identity. The Kurdish movement was already a part of the leftist movement in the 1970s and the HDP was helping to close the gap that opened up in the 1970s between Kurdish politics and leftist movements. At the national level, the HDP was gaining the support of social groups like the feminists, workers, leftists, LGBTQs, environmentalists and religious minorities driven by a meta-policy-seeking goal. Contrasting to the experience of the AKP, the party was ‘moderating’ not directly after state’s repression over its predecessors. It was rather happening in a process when the new emerging center under the AKP government created an opening for them in the system that the military-bureaucratic Kemalist state had not attempted. In doing so, it was following the ideological leadership of the imprisoned PKK leader, Abdullah Öcalan and adopting a platform of ‘radical democracy,’ which was originally a socialist idea that referred to the rejection of existing democratic models in favor of more pluralistic and direct democracy (Kaya and Whiting 2019, 100). Combined with these observations, my interviews also imply that it was a party with a policy-seeking goal, which seemed to be the main impetus for building

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new alliances in the western parts of Turkey. My interviews with feminists and environmentalists who joined the party in the west also confirm the ‘ideological closeness of their movement’ with the HDP agenda. However, in the east—or the ‘Kurdish political region’ (Çiçek 2017)— where the party’s traditional Kurdish constituency is based, the literature provides different sorts of evidence, which shows the fierce rivalry between the party and the AKP government. The HDP’s predecessors have controlled various local governments in the southeast region in the past. There is evidence showing that the HDP’s rebel wing, the PKK, formed several religious organizations such as the Democratic Islam Congress and initiated alternative Friday prayers where sermons were delivered in Kurdish as opposed to the prayer sermons held in Turkish in state-controlled mosques (Çiçek 2011; Sarigil 2018). In parallel, the HDP’s predecessor, the BDP (Barı¸s ve Demokrasi Partisi—Peace and Democracy Party), similarly introduced many religious Kurds into its ranks, developed a religion-friendly approach, all of which could be interpreted as a move to compete with the government party in order not to lose the traditional constituencies and the local offices derived from such support (Karakoç and Sarigil 2020, 254). The party’s ‘religious opening’ in the east in a way challenges its western, ‘radical democratic’ outlook which have also been raised by some of my interviewees. Thus, I argue that the HDP pursues an office-seeking behavior in the east of Turkey. The recent repressions that the HDP faces by the AKP government in the east in the securitized post-2015 era, i.e. the forceful replacement of the popularly elected HDP mayors by ‘kayyum’s [government appointees] is analogous to the 28 February event when the Turkish military forced the prime minister Erbakan to resign from government office. A party’s forceful removal from the office does not bring that party close to democratic ideas but rather produces a strategy to win those offices back. Hence, my main argument is that a successor ethnic or religious party with an office-seeking behavior that originates from political rivalry or repression is not likely to foster a process of democratization even though it frames its struggle against repression as an ‘issue of democracy.’ While the HDP’s meta-policy-seeking goal in the West in its pursuit of a pluralistic and direct democracy seems to be promising, its strategic rivalry with the government party in the east should also be cautiously noted in terms of its contribution to a future democracy in Turkey.

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1.3

Data and Methods

The data for this book is based on a triangulation of three rounds of indepth interviews conducted with a total of 66 party activists in the years 2007, 2011 and 2018, the media statements of the leaders of the ethnic and religious parties, the newspaper columns of the two leading liberal intellectuals, Hasan Cemal and Cengiz Çandar that supported the AKP in the 2000s. The interviews comprise of the local party activists at the district level from the AKP and the DTP in the year 2007 and former parliamentarians and local activists of the AKP and the HDP in the year 2018. The two additional interviews from the year 2011 were the ones that I had conducted with former parliamentarians of the FP who had closely known the former Islamist party leader, Necmettin Erbakan. They explained me the main causes of the internal party tensions between the reformist and the traditional factions before the rise of the AKP, which helped me understand the motivations of the AKP during its formation (see the full list of interviews in Appendix). Since the main goal of this book is to show how different groups outside of their traditional constituency provided organized support for the AKP and the HDP during the chosen electoral periods, I work with the qualitative data derived from my interviews and public statements appearing in media outlets rather than with survey data. My focus is to reveal the reasons for this organized support from two different groups for each party. On the AKP, these two groups are the liberal intellectuals and a segment belonging to the Kurdish movement. The liberal intellectuals did not formerly show support for the religious predecessor parties as they did for the AKP and the Kurdish backing for the AKP reached unprecedented levels that its Islamist predecessors had never witnessed in the past. The interviews I conducted with the AKP activists in the southeast in 2007 as well as the former parliamentarians representing the southeast region in 2018 particularly provide important sources of information to this end. In terms of the support of the liberal intellectuals, I mainly focus on the newspaper columns of Hasan Cemal and Cengiz Çandar who were in the 2000s shaping the public opinion on the AKP in major mainstream media outlets, such as Milliyet and Hürriyet. It is important to understand the arguments they were built-in support of the AKP. In fact, Hasan Cemal was not unconditionally supportive of the AKP and was portraying his hesitations in those years while it is possible to see higher levels of support for the AKP in the writings of Çandar.10 All in all,

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as my book mainly focuses on the increasing organized support for the AKP in 2002 and 2007, I studied twenty columns that they published before and after the two elections for both of these intellectuals, which in total makes around eighty columns. As for the HDP, I focus on revealing why the marginalized groups such as the feminist and the ecology movements on the one hand and the leftwing groups on the other supported the HDP in elections in 2015. The interviews that I conducted in Izmir and Ankara were particularly useful as they included the parliamentarians or local chairs representing the leftists, feminist movement and the ecology movement within the HDP umbrella. On the other hand, the interviews with the DTP activists in 2007 reflect the transition years for the pro-Kurdish parties when they were initially aiming to change the party toward this direction and they also provide useful insights. The data from the interviews conducted in 2007 with the AKP and DTP district activists belong to a larger project titled ‘Authoritarian Party Structures’ which includes questions mainly on the internal structure of party organizations. The findings from this project on intra-party authoritarianism were published in the book that I authored in 2011 (Ayan Musil 2011). However, this project included six interview questions for the AKP and the DTP activists, which are also relevant for the goal of this study11 : 7. How long have you been a member of this party? 8. Did you have any ties with other parties before? 9. What are the three most important reasons that motivated you to be a party member? And why specifically this party? 19. What is the most important concept / idea that best defines your party? 20. What should be done to make your party more successful? These questions from 2007 were also asked for the interviewees of 2018. The questions that relate to the ‘motivation to work for that specific party’ and the ‘most important concept/idea that best defines your party’ provide the micro-dynamics of party identity and goals. The question of what else should be done to make the party more successful reflects whether the party activists were pleased with the coalitions that their party established (or was going to establish) with other groups. In 2018,

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this was further analyzed with additional questions. As for the HDP, the additional questions were: 1. In what way do you think have the pro-Kurdish parties changed in the last two decades? 2. What do you think has made your party more appealing to different groups (emphasizing feminists, leftists, ecology groups, etc.) in elections? What attracts these groups to this party? 3. Why do you think your party (earlier the DEHAP and the DTP) lost votes in 2002 and 2007 elections? What made the AKP get the votes of the Kurds in the southeast in those times? 4. Do you feel there is a difference in the electoral strategy of your party in the east and the west of Turkey? If yes, do you find this challenging for your party? If yes, how do you cope with this challenge? 5. What was your party’s position on Gezi protests in 2013? Did your party change its position on these protests later? Why, why not? 6. What were the major problems of democracy in the post-Gezi period (2013–2015) and what are they today? How was your party related to these problems between 2013 and 2015 and how is it related now? 7. Do you think the failure of the peace process was a consequence or a cause of the AKP’s shift toward authoritarianism? On the AKP, the following questions were added to the list: 8. What do you think made your party appealing to different groups (specifying the Kurdish movement and the liberal democrats) in 2002 and 2007 elections? 9. How did the decisions of the Turkish constitutional court (i.e. decision on Erdogan’s party affiliation in 2002 and the decision on the parliamentary voting on presidential race in 2007) affect your party during the elections in 2002 and 2007? How did you and your leadership cope with this back then? 10. How did the military e-memorandum in 2007 affect your party? How did you and your leadership cope with this back then?

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11. Why did your party support Turkey’s accession to the EU back then? There is a general feeling that your party does not support this membership anymore? What do you think? 12. Do you think your party is as appealing as it used to be in the past to the Kurds and the liberal democrats? Why, why not? 13. What were the major problems of democracy in the 2000s and what are they today? Why do you think this situation exists? Is there a change in the way your party viewed democracy between then and now? Both sets of interview questions in 2007 and 2018 were conducted right after the two national elections held in the country and had a semi-structured nature. Here, I must note that reaching out to the interviewees from the AKP was much more difficult than reaching out to the HDP interviewees in 2018. While I used the snowball method in finding my interviewees, almost half of the contacts I obtained from the AKP declined my request for an interview as they were less willing to talk to me on issues related to the Kurdish issue and the situation of democracy. This not only shows the difference in the political atmosphere between 2007 which was relatively open and more democratic compared to 2018 but also the probable dissatisfaction that the party activists had on their own party. In analyzing the interview data, I was guided by Silverman (2017) and took a critical approach in analyzing the responses. First, rather than giving an identity to the respondents on my own, I looked into how they signaled their own identities. Second, I followed the intensive–extensive– intensive order to analyze the dataset: first, I made an intensive analysis of the transcripts, which helped me detect the main arguments of the respondents; next, moved to the second step, which was an extensive analysis of the whole dataset to see how many times each argument was maintained. I then identified the transcripts, which showed consistency in their hypotheses and made another intensive analysis on them. All in all, the supremacy of the interview method over the survey method lies in the intensive analysis of the data rather than an extensive one. That is why, during the interviews, it was particularly important for me to explore how the respondents justified their own responses to the questions.

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1.4

Structure of the Book

While this book is structured in a way to demonstrate the causal mechanism shown in Fig. 1.1, the next chapter first starts with outlining the origins of the HDP and the AKP. I argued that for the ownership of the ‘issue of democracy’ to turn into a force of democratization, one needs to analyze the initial party goals. The aim of the second chapter, thus, is to provide an understanding of party genetics prior to their electoral success. Starting with their sources of legitimacy that helped these parties to slightly move from their ‘anti-system’ background toward confrontational parties with new images, this chapter bridges the findings of my interviews, leaders’ statements and the secondary sources, which show that the AKP resembled a nationwide office-seeking party than a vote or policy-seeking one when it was born. It will also discuss how the HDP was a party divided in its goals: office-seeking in the eastern region and (meta)policy-seeking at the national level. In line with the previous studies, I define the Turkish-Islam synthesis in the 1980s and the Kurdish opening in the late 2000s as the main sources of legitimacy for these two parties before they succeeded in elections. The third chapter of the book aims to show the discursive opportunity structures within which these parties were able to confront the repressive measures of the state. In the case of the AKP, this was the context of Europeanization, which provided an important discursive opportunity for the AKP to take advantage of the public criticisms against the political acts of the Constitutional Court and the military. In the case of the HDP, this was the post-Gezi context, which had already challenged the legitimacy of the AKP government in 2013 and gave an opportunity to the HDP to be publicly more critical of the authoritarian AKP policies. Following the contextual discussion, I move to the most important chapter of this book, the fourth chapter, which illustrates the causal mechanism that starts with the first part where the repressive acts of the state turn into a salient issue in electoral competition. It continues with the second part, whereby these parties pick this issue as an ‘issue of democracy’ and starts convincing other social groups on their ‘competence’ to deal with this issue. In the third part, I reveal the reasons why the chosen groups in my study decided to ally with these parties while each of these elections turned into a competition between ‘the underdog and the power’ in the end. In this chapter, I apply this causal mechanism for all three national elections under study—2002, 2007 and June 2015—and merge the data

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from various media sources on how the party leaders made confronting statements against the state with the data from my interviews. Finally in my concluding chapter, I discuss the implications of this causal mechanism on regime change in Turkey. I emphasize that ownership of the issue of democracy is not likely to end up with democratization if it is owned as a consequence of an office-seeking strategy. As observed in the case of the AKP and in the case of the eastern wing of the HDP, a party is born with an office-seeking goal if its predecessor has already been in office and yet that office is challenged by the state either in a fierce rivalry or by using direct force. Thus in this chapter, I draw lessons from the AKP’s capture of state institutions and provide reasons to be cautious about the HDP’s office-seeking goal in the east while emphasizing the potential of its current policy-seeking goal at the national level for Turkey’s future democratization.

Notes 1. ‘Opportunity for democratization’ is a term coined by Brownlee (2007) who considers this term as a subset of the broader notion of ‘critical juncture’ (Collier and Collier 1991). Brownlee (2007, 24) argues that opportunities for democratization are structural openings, which do not occur in durable regimes. They do not guarantee that change will occur either. In this book, I adopt Brownlee’s approach. The 2002, 2007 and 2015 national elections created opportunities for democratization in Turkey but these opportunities were missed. 2. For the comprehensive longitudinal analyses that shed light on these interrelated questions on the case of the AKP, see (Baykan 2018; Çınar 2019). 3. For instance, the HDP’s ratio of party members to party voters (M/V) was 0.6 in 2015, which was significantly lower than the scores of other parties. See Ayan Musil (2018, 85). 4. On the socio-cultural dimension, see for instance Bora (1998) and Kalaycıo˘glu (2007). On the socioeconomic dimension, see the discussion by Co¸sar and Özman (2004). 5. For the studies that defined the AKP in Turkey as a case of Islamist party moderation, see for instance Somer (2014), Tezcür (2010b), Tepe (2012), Gümü¸sçü (2010) and Sokhey and Yıldırım (2013). For defining the HDP as a case of moderation, see Celep (2018). For the studies that defined the AKP as a case of populism in its early years of incumbency, see for instance Aytaç and Öni¸s (2014), Yabancı (2016) and Gürsoy (2021).

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6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

For the definition of HDP as a case of left-wing populism, see Tekdemir (2019). Sartori (1976, 132–133) defines an anti-system party as one which comprises of ‘a belief system that does not share the values of the political order within which it operates.’. For an excellent overview that discusses the pitfalls of the inclusionmoderation thesis, see Tepe (2019). See Baykan (2018, 33). Baykan also adds that the personalistic mass character of the party was another factor that helped the AKP to compete with this establishment when it was in office. For a summary of the earlier criticisms on Mardin’s framework see Bakıner (2018, 506–507). For a more comprehensive analysis of the relationship between the liberal intellectuals and political power during the AKP incumbency, see Ersoy and Üstüner (2016) and Fisher-Onar (2007). For the full list of interview questions, see Ayan Musil (2011).

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Kumbaraciba¸si, A. C. 2009. Turkish Politics and the Rise of the AKP: Dilemmas of Institutionalization and Leadership Strategy. London: Routledge. Laclau, E. 2005. Populism: What’s in a Name? In Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, edited by F. Panizza, 32–49. London: New Left Books. Lieberson, S. 1994. “More on the Uneasy Case for Using Mill-Type Methods in Small-N Comparative Studies.” Social Forces 72 (4): 1225–1237. Mardin, S. ¸ 1973. “Center-Periphery Relations: A Key to Turkish Politics?” Daedalus 102 (1): 169–190. McCulloch, A. 2013. “Does Moderation Pay? Centripetalism in Deeply Divided Societies.” Ethnopolitics 12 (2): 111–132. Meguid, B. M. 2005. “Competition Between Unequals: The Role of Mainstream Party Strategy in Niche Party Success.” American Political Science Review 99 (3): 347–359. Moral, M., and E. Tokdemir. 2017. “Justices ‘en Garde’: Ideological Determinants of the Dissolution of Anti-Establishment Parties.” International Political Science Review 38 (3): 264–280. Mudde, C. 2004. “The Populist Zeitgeist.” Government and Opposition 39 (4): 541–563. Mudde, C., and C. R. Kaltwasser. 2018. “Studying Populism in Comparative Perspective: Reflections on the Contemporary and Future Research Agenda.” Comparative Political Studies 51 (13): 1667–1693. Ocakli, F. 2015. “Notable Networks: Elite Recruitment, Organizational Cohesiveness, and Islamist Electoral Success in Turkey.” Politics and Society 43 (3): 385–413. Onar, N. 2007. “Kemalists, Islamists, and Liberals: Shifting Patterns of Confrontation and Consensus, 2002–06.” Turkish Studies 8 (2): 273–288. Öni¸s, Z., and E. F. Keyman. 2003. “Turkey at the Polls: A New Path Emerges.” Journal of Democracy 14 (2): 95–107. Özbudun, E. 2010. “Party Prohibition Cases: Different Approaches by the Turkish Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights.” Democratization 17 (1): 125–142. Panebianco, A. 1988. Political Parties: Organization and Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Petrocik, J. R. 1996. “Issue Ownership in Presidential Elections, with a 1980 Case Study.” American Journal of Political Science 40 (3): 825–850. Pirro, A. L. P. 2014. “Digging into the Breeding Ground: Insights into the Electoral Performance of Populist Radical Right Parties in Central and Eastern Europe.” East European Politics 30 (2): 246–270. Pirro, A. L. P., and P. Taggart. 2018. “The Populist Politics of Euroscepticism in Times of Crisis: A Framework for Analysis.” Politics 38 (3): 253–262. Przeworski, A. 2005. “Democracy as an Equilibrium.” Public Choice 123: 253– 273.

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Sarigil, Z. 2018. Ethnic Boundaries in Turkish Politics: The Secular Kurdish Movement and Islam. New York: New York University Press. Sartori, G. 1976. Parties and Party Systems: How Parties Organize Change and Adaptation in Western Democracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sayari, S. 2007. “Towards a New Turkish Party System?” Turkish Studies 8 (2): 197–210. Schwedler, J. 2006. Faith in Moderation: Islamist Parties in Jordan and Yemen. New York: Cambridge University Press. Schwedler, J. 2007. “Democratization, Inclusion and the Moderation of Islamist Parties.” Development 50 (1): 56–61. Schwedler, J. 2011. “Can Islamists Become Moderates?: Rethinking the Inclusion-Moderation Hypothesis.” World Politics 63 (2): 347–376. Silverman, D. 2017. “How Was It for You? The Intervew Society and the Irresistable Rise of the (Poorly Analyzed) Interview.” Qualitative Research 17 (2): 144–158. Sokhey, S. W., and A. K.Yildirim. 2013. “Economic Liberalization and Political Moderation: The Case of Anti-System Parties.” Party Politics 19 (2): 230– 255. Somer, M. 2014. “Moderation of Religious and Secular Politics, a Country’s “Centre” and Democratization.” Democratization 21 (2): 244–267. Somer, M. 2017. “Conquering Versus Democratizing the State: Political Islamists and Fourth Wave Democratization in Turkey and Tunisia.” Democratization 24 (6): 1025–1043. Sozen, Y. 2008. “Turkey Between Tutelary Democracy and Electoral Authoritarianism.” Private View 13: 78–84. Strøm, K. 1990. “A Behavioral Theory of Competitive Political Parties.” American Journal of Political Science 34 (2): 565–598. Taggart, P. 2000. Populism. Concepts in the Social Science: Populism. Tan, A. C. 1998. “The Impacts of Party Membership Size: A Cross-National Analysis.” Journal of Politics 60 (1): 188–198. Tekdemir, O. 2016. “Conflict and Reconciliation Between Turks and Kurds: the HDP as an Agonistic Actor.” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 16 (4): 651–669. Tekdemir, O. 2019. “Left-Wing Populism Within Horizontal and Vertical Politics: The Case of Kurdish-Led Radical Democracy in Agonistic Pluralism.” Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 23 (1): 335–349. Tepe, S. 2005. “Turkey’s AKP: A Model “Muslim-Democratic” Party?” Journal of Democracy 16 (3): 69–82. Tepe, S. 2012. “Moderation of Religious Parties: Electoral Constraints, Ideological Commitments, and the Democratic Capacities of Religious Parties in Israel and Turkey.” Political Research Quarterly 65 (3): 467–485.

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Tepe, S. 2019. The Inclusion-Moderation Thesis: An Overview. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/978019 0228637.013.788. Tezcür, G. M. 2010a. Muslim Reformers in Iran and Turkey: The Paradox of Moderation. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Tezcür, G. M. 2010b. “The Moderation Theory Revisited: The Case of Islamic Political Actors.” Party Politics 16 (1): 69–88. Walgrave, S., J. Lefevere, and A. Tresch. 2012. “The Associative Dimension of Issue Ownership.” Public Opinion Quarterly 76 (4): 771–782. Watts, N. F. 2006. “Activists in Office: Pro-Kurdish Contentious Politics in Turkey.” Ethnopolitics 5 (2): 125–144. Wuthrich, F. M. 2013. “An Essential Center-Periphery Electoral Cleavage and the Turkish Party System.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45 (4): 751–773. Yabanci, B. 2016. “Populism as the Problem Child of Democracy: The AKP’s Enduring Appeal and the Use of Meso-Level Actors.” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 16 (4): 591–617. Yegen, M. 2016. “The Turkish Left and the Kurdish Question.” Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 18 (2): 157–176. Yenigun, H. I. 2017. “The New Antinomies of the Islamic Movement in PostGezi Turkey: Islamism vs. Muslimism.” Turkish Studies 18 (2): 229–250. Yildiz, A. 2003. “Politico-Religious Discourse of Political Islam in Turkey: The Parties of National Outlook.” Muslim World 93 (2): 187–210.

CHAPTER 2

Comparing the Origins of the AKP and the HDP

The first chapter introduced the rationale for comparing the pro-Kurdish and Islamist parties in the Turkish context, underlying the transformation of their identity-based programs into broader platforms that receive the organized support of social groups outside of their traditional ethnicbased or religious-based constituencies. The two goals of this book are first to comparatively understand the formation of Islamist-successor (or post-Islamist) and Kurdish-successor (or Kurdish-led) parties which brought about important opportunities for democratization in certain electoral periods and second why these opportunities did not bring about a democratic regime change in Turkey. Within the framework of these broader goals, it is yet necessary to understand the contexts formative to the Islamist-successor and Kurdish-successor parties. Which contexts facilitated the formation of these parties and what type of goals did they have upon formation? Guided by these questions, this chapter has a dual aim. First, it addresses the political contexts, which provided the sources of legitimacy for the development of Islamist-successor and Kurdish-successor parties in Turkey. The RP—as the predecessor of the AKP—was formed in the post-1980 constitutional order, within the context of the Turkish-Islam Synthesis (TIS)—a mixture of Sunni Islam and Turkish nationalism— adopted by the military and maintained by the ANAP government in the 1980s. The DTP and the BDP—the predecessors of the HDP—were © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Ayan Musil, The Transformation of Kurdish and Islamist Parties in Turkey, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06293-3_2

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formed in a context, which included open debates about the Kurdish question. These debates were subsequently followed by the government’s ‘Kurdish opening’ (KO) initiative, intended to be a ‘comprehensive, multi-tiered policy approach to resolving tensions between the Turkish government and Turkey’s Kurdish population.’1 This chapter argues that these contexts (the TIS and the KO) provided a favorable setting for the predecessors of the AKP and the HDP to become publicly more visible and incorporate into the broader society. It was thanks to their predecessors’ socialization with other groups within these contexts that in the future AKP and the HDP could receive the organized support of diverse social groups in future elections. Second, the chapter aims to reveal the initial party goals (policy-seeking, office-seeking or vote-seeking) both for the AKP and the HDP upon their formation. I argue that the AKP emerged mainly as an office-seeking party while its predecessors (the RP and the FP) focused on a mixture of policyseeking and vote-seeking goals in the 1990s. When it emerged, the AKP elite emphasized ‘serving to the people’ and ‘effective governance.’ The rank-and-file within the party believed that it was going to be ‘a party of success’ and that is what sustained their loyalty to the AKP. The question of party ideology was left open both among the lower and upper echelons of the party. On the other side, I argue that the HDP was born as a policyoriented party at the national level, yet, took the form of an office-seeking party in the eastern part of Turkey in order to control the local population and the offices that the Kurdish ethnonationalist movement had acquired in the Kurdish political region. I show that the formation of office-seeking goals for both parties was closely related to keeping the political power in their hands vis-à-vis the state. The policy-seeking goal of the HDP at the national level, yet, was a consequence of its own internal party dynamics and aspiration to appeal to non-Kurdish groups in the western part of Turkey. This chapter is structured as follows: The first section presents the contexts (the TIS and the KO) within which the predecessors of the AKP and the HDP found the opportunity to be publicly more visible and legitimize their existence at the societal level. Without having acquired such legitimacy, these parties would not have been able to meet with different social groups and it would not be possible for the AKP and the HDP to form new electoral alliances in future elections (2002, 2007 for the AKP and 2015 for the HDP). The second section presents the goals of the AKP

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and the HDP upon their formation. It shows how the AKP was born as an office-seeking party while the HDP was born both as a policy-seeking party in the west and an office-seeking party in the east of Turkey.

2.1

Sources of Legitimacy of the Two Parties in the Political System

Even though the post-1980 constitutional order continued to be based on the monolithic ideology of Kemalism that stressed the principles of a unitary, national and secular state, the Turkish-Islam Synthesis (TIS) and the Kurdish opening (KO) helped strengthen the Islamist and proKurdish parties ‘on the ground’ respectively.2 The TIS was initiated by the state elite as a political strategy and implemented by the center-right ANAP between 1983 and 1991. The KO (2009–2010) was initiated by the AKP government during a status-quo change within the Turkish regime. The TIS and the KO unintentionally helped integrate the Islamist and Kurdish movements (and their party organizations) respectively into the political order, made them publicly more visible and interact with various social and interest groups (i.e. business, cultural, charitable or community-based groups). 2.1.1

Turkish-Islam Synthesis (TIS) and the Rising Legitimacy of the AKP’s Predecessors

Following the junta government of 1980–1983, the military introduced the official ideology, the TIS, as a new constitutional order based on the concept of a Turkish nationalism accommodating Islam. The reasons for the adoption of this official ideology are explained by Özdalga (2006) as a result of both global and national factors: The fear of Islam’s revolutionary potential following the 1979 Iranian revolution, as well as the support given by the association of nationalist right-wing intellectuals (Aydınlar Oca˘gı) to the leaders of the military intervention of 1980, elevated the TIS to an official ideology. Indeed Aydınlar Oca˘gı was the first association to launch the concept of the TIS during the 1970s. The implementation of the TIS between 1983 and 1991 by centerright ANAP government, yet, was not the first time Islamism was incorporated into the political order. In her analysis of the Islam-state interaction in modern Turkey, Sakallio˘glu (1996) argues that the state strategy toward Islam often changed from repression to accommodation

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throughout Turkish history. Similarly, Aytürk (2014, 696) states that, when it was not possible to ignore Islam, ‘it was incorporated as an instrument of control whose archaic mould, it was hoped, could temporarily contain social unrest, that is until this function too became superfluous as a result of Kemalist modernization.’ The state had directed one of the most repressive strategies toward Islam against the Sufi-brotherhoods (tarikats ) in the early Republican era when it encountered two rebellions (Seyh ¸ Sait and Menemen uprisings in 1925 and 1930 respectively) against its secularization policies. The new order established by the Kemalist elite afterward aimed to install the necessary political and cultural institutions to break with the Ottoman past and to reach the contemporary level of what they considered to be a western civilization (Özbudun and Kazancıgil 1981). The idea was to replace the sultanate-caliphate regime with an independent secular nationstate. It adopted Western political, legal, economic structures as well as a culture so that the Turkish people could be liberated from the constraints of the Islamic system established by the ulema and the Islamic brotherhoods.3 Hence, there was no room for any Islamic activity. The tarikats and their devotees were forced to go underground. The partial incorporation of Islam and Islamism into the public sphere happened for the first time during Turkey’s transition to democracy between 1946 and 1960. Ahmad (1993, 10) calls this period as the end of militant secularism even though it was still used as a stick. The Islamists despised the CHP as the ‘party of the westernized’ and viewed it as ‘the party of the bureaucracy and the gendarmerie.’ This view, having gained support from the masses, led to a growing support for the DP, the first party that took part in national elections after splitting from the founding party of the Republic. As Pelt (2008, 98) argues, there is a variety of views with regard to the DP’s intentions toward religion and politics, but it stands a fact that the DP’s success rested on its ability to attract the masses by appealing to values central to their lives including religion. The religious orders had become active again and the DP cultivated their goodwill. Among the leading accusations raised by the CHP against the DP was that the party had exploited religion for political purposes, increased its authoritarian measures and infringed upon the constitution. Following the 1960 military coup and the closure of the DP, the 1961 Constitution once again created a new liberal atmosphere for the organization of religious movements. Communism was viewed as an internal threat to which Islam was the antidote in the 1960s. As the

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salience of political Islam in national issues and policies, a highly influential Islamist movement (Milli Görü¸s ) worked toward the establishment of the MNP, the first political party that purely advocated a national culture, education and social justice based on the principles of Islam (Çinar and Gencel Sezgin 2013, 340). The 1971 military intervention interrupted the Islamist activism of the 1960s and the MNP was closed down by a court decision. However, it was quickly replaced with a successor party, the MSP, which played a visible role in coalition politics between 1973 and 1980. The leader of the MSP, Necmettin Erbakan served as deputy prime minister in both center-left and center-right governments. Yet, how was the TIS (1983–1991) different from the previous openings that provided an opportunity for the growth of Islamist parties in Turkish political history? While Aytürk (2014, 696) argues that Kemalist attitudes toward Islam remained more or less stagnant from 1923 to 1980, the beginning of the post-1980 military regime, there were radical changes in state policy toward Islam in style and substance. The sociopolitical activities of the tarikats that were banned in 1925 reached peak levels, with their members having penetrated all ranks of political society. The Turkish state purposefully permitted religion to be taught more widely in schools and allowed the influence of the sufi orders to expand through their Quranic schools and students’ hostels (Ahmad 1991). Sakallio˘glu (1996, 244) further adds that: … the [Islamist] movement has developed not only in response to pressures exerted by the masses, but also as a direct consequence of the designs and policies of the Turkish state, which acts to further its own aims in a changed environment, not in an attempt to appease the Islamists.

Several studies note that the power and the role of Islam had immensely increased in this period. Keyman (2007) explains that it became an effective political, economic and cultural force that has dictated the changing nature of Turkish modernity. Çarko˘glu and Kalaycıo˘glu (2009, 11) argue that the TIS repressed the left and paved the paving for conservative and nationalist politics in Turkey, with many Islamists serving in the centerright ANAP governments and parliamentary groups. Eligür (2010, 40) argues that the Islamist movement became the secular state elite’s ‘inadvertent elite ally’ in this period, which provided a political opportunity structure for the Islamist RP successfully get mobilized through its strong organizational network in the 1990s. While the literature emphasizes the

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impact of the TIS on the expansion of Islamist party mobilization to a great extent, what remains, however, unclear is how the TIS paved the way for the emergence of the AKP, an Islamist-successor party that could build alliances with different social groups one decade later. Recently, through his argument on ‘selective pluralism,’ Baykan (2018, 40–58) has offered a linkage between the TIS period and the emergence of the AKP: He has argued that the military-bureaucratic state elite’s topdown project of creating a religious and nationalist society in order to save the country from the perils of the left created electoral volatility and fragmentation of the center-right and the center-left in the 1990s. Such fragmentation, coupled with the worsening social and economic conditions, unintentionally fostered the growth of the Islamist party activism. Having attained record-high electoral results in 1994 local and 1995 national elections, the RP then formed a coalition government with the center-right DYP. This miscalculated rise of the Islamist party to power was later suppressed by another state intervention on 28 February 1997 through a soft-military coup d’etat. Relying on their former experience on elections and the office, some of the elites within the Islamist party started developing reformist ideas, who eventually formed the post-Islamist AKP (Baykan 2018, 50). To put it in a nutshell, Baykan emphasizes that if it had not been for the growth of Islamist parties in the 1990s, triggered by the selective pluralist context provided by the TIS, the Islamist-successor AKP would not have achieved such a landslide victory in elections and a disproportionate majority in parliament in 2002. While agreeing with Baykan’s logic, I present a slightly different argument with regard to the impact of the TIS on the emergence of a successful post-Islamist party: I argue that, thanks to a TIS setting that enabled the growth of Islamist activism between 1983 and 1991, the Islamist RP retrieved public legitimacy and was further incorporated as a normal political actor in the wider societal spectrum despite the growing suspicion against this party among secularist groups. The party consolidated social relations not only with religious orders and networks, but also with groups and civic organizations, from whom in the future elections, the Islamist-successor AKP would be able to receive organized support. Poguntke (2006) argues that all political parties use relevant organizations that constitute their environment to create linkages to diverse groups of potential voters: Civic organizations are important intermediaries between parties and society at large. They establish relations with political parties either in exchange for policy pledges or to negotiate policy concessions

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in exchange for the mobilization of organizational support. Within a positive milieu provided by the TIS for Islamic activism, the RP was similarly establishing linkages with key organizations such as the umbrella organization for businessmen, the Association of Independent Industrialists and Businessmen (MÜSIAD) that cared particularly about economic liberalism (in addition to conservative values). The RP also enhanced its visibility among the certain Kurdish groups based in the southeast Anatolia in Turkey. The MÜSIAD, an umbrella for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), was emphasizing the Islamic character of Turkish society not only to show the compatibility of Islam with capitalism but also use religion to foster a sense of solidarity among national and international business communities (Buˇgra 1998, 536). The MÜSIAD, run by the Anatolian bourgeoisie, was countering the uncompetitive environment created by state support of the Association of Turkish Industrialists and Businessmen (TÜSIAD), which included big businesses. The TIS context, accompanied by a profound economic liberalization process in the 1980s, had strengthened this Anatolian bourgeoisie that was socially Islamic and economically liberal, seeking rapid unification with the European markets (Yavuz 1997, 72). Even though throughout the 1970s the Islamist parties were already acting as a source of channel for the marginalized Anatolian businesses, with the increasing popularity of Islamism in the 1990s and the establishment of the MÜSIAD, the Anatolia-based SMEs turned into a key institutional partner for the RP during the elections. As Gümü¸sçü (2010) aptly explains, during the factional split between the traditionalists and the moderates in the late 1990s, the MÜSIAD was going to supply the political and financial resources to the moderates who were going to establish the AKP in 2001. The RP leadership was politically distant from the West and the EU, which was going to be a major concern for the devout bourgeoisie that had already established close relations with the EU following the economic liberalization process. A long-term RP activist and former parliamentarian, Mehmet Bekaro˘glu (2007) also explains in his memoirs that the emergence of the AKP was a choice made by the ‘moderates’ to abandon the ‘Islamist tradition’ for the sake of integrating into the neoliberal global markets. Hence, the TIS context, first, provided an opportunity for the Islamist RP to establish close ties with the devout SMEs that strived for further economic liberalization in the early 1990s. Then, the ongoing commitment of one of its successors, the reformist AKP [not the traditionalist SP] to economic liberalism enabled

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this party to retrieve the support of the EU and the liberal intellectuals in one-decade time. Earlier in the literature, it has rightly been noted that the devout bourgeoisie was providing the sources of success for the AKP project in 2002 (Gümü¸sçü 2010). But it should also be emphasized that it was their connection on global neoliberal values rather than social and religious conservatism that helped the AKP build a coalition with a group of liberal intellectuals in the 2000s. As Chapter 4 will illustrate, these intellectuals cared about Turkey’s integration both into the global and the EU markets. In addition to the intensification of links with the devout SMEs, the RP also became publicly visible among certain Kurdish groups concerned with their ethnic identity in the southeastern provinces of Turkey in the early 1990s. The RP was different from other parties in Turkey because it emphasized historic Ottoman and Islamic bonds, not Turkish ethnicity, and thus appealed to the Kurds having an identity issue more than other parties (Yavuz 1997, 72). Moreover, the RP’s discourse was merging anti-elitism with Islamism: It campaigned around the idea of Just Order, criticizing the revolution of the early Republican era and the westernization imposed by the republican elite, which did not elevate the country to the place it deserved. It did so without overcriticizing the secular order, but also emphasizing the need to get strength from God (Hak) (Eligür 2010, 162). However, in 1991, the RP leader Erbakan made a strategic decision to ally with the Turkish nationalist MÇP (Milliyetçi Çalı¸sma Partisi—Nationalist Task Party), whose understanding of a nation was based on linguistic and cultural homogeneity. Erbakan’s strategy came against the will of the party’s local organizations in the Kurdish-majority provinces as he prioritized gaining visibility rather in the conservative provinces of central Anatolia.4 While the strategy cost many votes for the RP in the Kurdish-majority provinces, it still reached 16 percent of the votes in this region despite its alliance with Turkish nationalist party (see Fig. 2.1). In 1995 national elections, without any electoral alliance with another party, the RP’s campaign message—the Just Order—appealed to a higher percentage of Kurdish voters. During the party rally in 1994 in Diyarbakır, which is the Kurdish capital of Turkey, the RP leader Erbakan provided a harsh criticism of the Kemalist state (referred as ‘they’) in the following way:

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Fig. 2.1 Comparison of the 1991 and 1995 national election results in Kurdish-majority provinces (Note The numbers indicate the average vote percentage for 14 provinces: A˘grı, Batman, Bingöl, Bitlis, Diyarbakır, Hakkari, I˘gdır, Kars, Mardin, Mu¸s, Sanlıurfa, ¸ Sırnak, ¸ Tunceli, Van. In 1991, the proKurdish HEP formed an electoral alliance with the social democratic SHP and the nationalist MÇP formed a coalition with the RP. By 1995, the SHP had merged with the CHP and the MÇP had become the MHP)

They did not recognize our Islam brotherhood. They said; ‘we do not know what Islam is.’ They ignored the bond that ties the 65 million people in this country. They started implementing racist and lunatic policies. They forced our brother who owns the Kurdish issue to declare himself a Turk. Look, if the God has created me as a Kurd, I cannot change this. What matters if I say I am a Kurd or a Turk? Why doesn’t it matter? Because no matter we are Kurdish or Turkish, we are first and foremost Muslims. We are each other’s brothers.5

As Bozarslan (1996, 18) argued, the RP’s success in this region was very different from the rise of political Islam in other parts of Turkey:

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The Kurds saw it as ‘distinct enough from the social democratic and conservative national parties, which they held responsible for the country’s policies in Kurdistan, but also universal enough to serve as a link between Kurdistan and the rest of Turkey.’ The RP and the pro-Kurdish HADEP that campaigned on an ethnonationalist card almost had the same level of success in 1995 elections (22 and 23 percent respectively) (see Fig. 2.1). Indeed, during the press conference right after the electoral victory of the RP in 1995, Erbakan underlined the success of his party in the southeast of Turkey, implying that his proposed solution to the Kurdish question based on Muslim brotherhood as a unifying factor, received the final approval of the Kurds.6 Hence, the TIS context in Turkey greatly aided the Islamist party not only in terms of the growth of its conservative constituency via the expansion of Islamic brotherhoods and other faith-based networks as the previous studies have demonstrated, but also through consolidating the RP’s links with an economically liberal and a socially conservative bourgeoisie in central Anatolia, and increasing its appeal to the Kurdish constituency in the 1990s. Both of these social groups, the Kurds and the bourgeoisie were going to be the key supporters of the RP’s successor, the AKP, even after the AKP elite’s declaration that the party terminated its association with Islamism. The AKP’s ownership of the issue of democracy, confronting a military-bureaucratic state in 2002 and 2007 matched up very well with groups with an interest in Turkey’s integration into the EU and global markets (i.e. liberal intellectuals) and the recognition of ethnic rights (i.e. Kurdish groups). The more the AKP framed its electoral campaigns as a ‘struggle for democracy’ against such a state, the stronger perception these groups had against the military-bureaucratic state as the main hurdle they were facing. 2.1.2

Desecuritization of the Kurdish Identity in the 2000s and the Rising Legitimacy of the HDP’s Predecessors

While the TIS was an important context that assisted the Islamist RP to gain further public legitimacy and intensify its relations with certain social groups, it was the context of the KO that had a similar impact on the pro-Kurdish parties in the late 2000s. Within the 1990s, Kurdish separatism along with political Islam was declared the most serious threat to the Turkish national security (Polat 2009). The first pro-Kurdish party, the HEP, was established in 1990 and gained 22 seats in parliament

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through an alliance with the social democratic SHP. The HEP’s promotion of the Kurdish political and cultural rights had raised concerns for many bureaucratic and elected officials. As Watts (1999, 646) explains, the HEP deputies were less experienced in the arena of national politics, more grounded in local sentiments of resistance and resentment: For instance, during the nationally televised oath-taking ceremony in the Turkish parliament in 1991, the HEP deputy Hatip Dicle had stated that, ‘I and my colleagues take this oath under the pressure of the constitution;’ while another deputy, Leyla Zana added a sentence in Kurdish to her oath.7 Such political acts paved the way for a ‘parliamentary crisis,’ while the images from the HEP party congress, filled with the flags of the Kurdish armed group, the PKK further accelerated the tension among public. While these events led to the closure of the HEP by a decision of the Constitutional Court in 1993, the swift formation of the DEP helped these deputies to keep their seats in parliament. Yet, the civil war between the PKK and the Turkish continued with increasing casualties in the 1990s and the DEP also faced a closure in 1994. The deputies, Leyla Zana, Hatip Dicle, Orhan Do˘gan and Selim Sadak were convicted of membership in the PKK and sentenced to prison for 15 years. The closure of the DEP led to the formation of the Kurdish-successor parties HADEP, DEHAP and the DTP, each of which failed to renounce the PKK violence in the way desired by the public and continued to be marginalized by the state in the political system (Ayan Musil and Maze 2021). They were continuously condemned by the media and the other parties for not being able to call the PKK a ‘terrorist organization’ while many of the party leaders and deputies were interrogated, arrested, sentenced to prison or even killed by unknown assailants. The Constitutional Court dissolved these parties up until the foundation of the successor BDP in 2008 in the name of the protection of the territorial integrity of the nation and fight against separatist terrorism. Among these parties, the DTP, founded in 2005, coincides with a decade in which the Kurdish identity started becoming desecuritized within Turkey’s Europeanization context under the AKP’s first term in government (2002–2007). Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Prime Minister at the time, publicly acknowledged that the Turkish state made mistakes in relation to its Kurdish citizens in his reputable Diyarbakır speech.8 This speech was welcome by the Kurdish constituency in the east of Turkey and increased the trust of the Kurdish constituency in the AKP, raising finally the hopes for a future peace settlement. The desecuritization of

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the Kurdish identity could also be observed through significant changes in official state policies as a result of the EU accession reforms (Güne¸s 2012; Sarigil and Karakoc 2017, 198). Within this period, there were at times conflicts between the proKurdish party representatives and the Kurdish rebel group, the PKK. For instance, when the PKK in 2004 declared the end of a unilateral ceasefire that had started in 1999; the party representatives were bold enough to publicly criticize this decision. The former deputies of the DEP—by then the members of the DTP—had been released from prison earlier that year. They stated the urgent need to silence the weapons and end the conflict because Turkey had entered a new era due to its relations with the EU.9 Leyla Zana further added that, ‘if Turkey were not given a date of negotiation due to the ongoing conflict, the consequences would be heavy. The history would not forgive this deadly mistake [of ending the ceasefire].’10 The desecuritization process finally brought the ‘Kurdish opening’ or what the AKP government called, a ‘democratic opening’ project for national unity and brotherhood launched in 2009. As explained by Al and Byrd (2018, 617–618), the policies based on this project were comprised of: … Kurdish language becoming an elective course in public schools, giving Kurdish names back to those villages that were renamed in Turkish during the securitisation era, an official state television channel broadcasting in Kurdish language, and finally the peace talks with the imprisoned leader of the PKK, Abdullah Öcalan.

Despite the ultimate goal of disarming the PKK and resolving the Kurdish conflict, the opening ended up providing limited results. It failed in the longer term and a peace settlement was never reached. The reasons for the failure have been extensively discussed by the scholars of the Kurdish conflict and are beyond the scope of this book (Baser and Ozerdem 2021; Kayhan Pusane 2014; Özpek 2017; Sarigil and Karakoc 2017). What is yet important for the purpose of this book is the effect the KO made on Turkish society regarding the further legitimization of the pro-Kurdish parties. This was the case for the DTP, which incorporated DEHAP but also included other civic groups under one umbrella. It originated from the Diyarbakir-based Democratic Society Movement (Demokratik Toplum Hareketi, DTH), which was comprised of civil society groups, trade

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unions, reputable Kurdish political activists and politicians that debate, develop and implement the idea of democratic autonomy. It was founded by the imprisoned deputies of the HEP, Leyla Zana, Orhan Do˘gan, Selim Sadak and Hatip Dicle who aimed at ‘a broad participation of all those Kurdish nationalists willing to endorse a new democratic autonomy project’ (Saylan 2012, 191). The Kurdish movement’s shift away from a secessionist ideology toward more integration into a democratic state of Turkey also played a role in the formation of this movement. Öcalan, by then the imprisoned leader of the Kurdish movement, had proposed the idea of a democratic confederation as an alternative to the solution of the Kurdish question (Aydın and Emrence 2015; Güne¸s 2019; Saeed 2016). The confederation idea aimed to bring together the Kurds living in different states of the Middle East under one sociopolitical structure and to establish their own self-governing councils at the local level. In this sense, it would operate across the borders, spread democracy to the grassroots level and organize the society living in Kurdistan from the level of village communes without having to establish a nation-state (Güne¸s 2019, 258). This idea was soon later adopted by the PKK as well as by the legal pro-Kurdish party, the DTP in 2007 (Gürbüz 2016; Saeed 2016, 90–91). In 2007, the DTP followed this ideological track and campaigned on a platform based on the social and democratic transformation of Turkey, which included the empowerment of women and civil society organizations while advocating the creation of a new constitution enabling inclusive and participatory mechanisms for the society.11 Saylan (2012, 192) argues that in terms of its political goals, the DTP’s specificity compared with its predecessors lies in the policy of ‘democratic autonomy’ that was entrenched in the party’s regulations in 2007. During the 2007 national elections, the DTP allied with other socialist parties and established a bloc of independent candidates called ‘Thousand Hopes Candidates (Bin Umut Adayları)’ to bypass the countrywide 10 percent electoral threshold and enter the parliament. As Kaya (2019, 803) explains, this bloc ‘incorporated nearly all socialist organizations and put forward concrete, achievable goals, caused excitement and hope among the left-leaning public—not only in Kurdistan but also in the western part of Turkey.’ The bloc offered an alternative to those who had affinity neither with the nationalist-authoritarian bloc of the CHP and the MHP nor with the AKP government at that time. Thanks to this strategy, the party entered the parliament for the second time since the 1991 national election and formed a parliamentary group with 22 deputies.

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The Kurdish movement was historically integrated into the Turkish left and this was not the first time there was an alliance between the Kurdish and left-wing parties in Turkey. The first pro-Kurdish party, the HEP, had also allied with Turkey’s social democratic SHP during the 1991 parliamentary elections. One can make Bozarslan’s (2012) argument for the DTP in 2007 elections: it was still ‘above all a Kurdish party, plus a leftwing party,’ but this time, the Kurdish-left alliance was taking place in a desecuritized environment, legitimized and accepted by a broader audience. The interviews conducted with the DTP activists in 2007 confirm this position. When the activists were asked to define their party or why they joined this particular party, most of them referred to the recognition of Kurdish rights within the framework of a democratic Turkey. E22 from Diyarbakır who joined the party in the early 1990s (when it was named as the HEP) stated that: I can tell you the core ideology of our party as follows: Our policy is to live together with the peoples that are constitutionally guaranteed, including the Kurds, in a democratic unity in Turkey and then living together. However, the press is monopolized and supported by the government. They charge the deputies on the grounds of terrorism, as it happened to the HEP deputies in 1991. This habit still goes on in 2007. It is necessary to abandon it. Our chairman also stated that we have hard time overcoming such problems. But there is at least an effort to overcome. One can evaluate whether it is sufficient or insufficient. I think it is insufficient.

E26 from Istanbul, who joined the party at the time of HADEP, seconded this view in an interview conducted in 2007: DTP is a leftist party. There is an oppressed nation at work. The party organizes peace rallies, press releases, and activities for years to stop the war so that people do not die. The other parties do not pursue such actions. They ally with the policy of war, total destruction and denial.

On the other side, there were party activists in 2007 who joined the proKurdish party because it was the best party that represented the ‘left’ in Turkey, alongside its struggle for the Kurdish cause. E31 from Izmir, who used to work for the CHP in the past, stated that he started being active in the pro-Kurdish parties since the foundation of the HEP for the following reason: ‘If we live in this country which has problems, and if

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we are the citizens coming from a certain culture, we have some duties to fulfill, at least instead of being idle. At least, I am a high school graduate, a person belonging to the 68 generations. That’s why I considered it my duty to join a party. I could have worked for a union but I decided on the DTP. It has ties with democratic left-wing parties such as the SDP, EMEP or ÖDP.’ Similar to this respondent, E33 from Mersin also joined the proKurdish party as a left-wing activist in 1991, after serving for the CHP for several years. But he was critical of the DTP, because, he argued, it still had not sufficiently Turkey-ized (Türkiyeli’le¸smemek)12 : We say we are a party of Turkey, but we still cannot Turkey-ize. We do not integrate into the larger society. Parties within the system see us as the party of an ethnic group. This is our major shortcoming. We are fighting for it and making an effort to overcome it but since we cannot show our efforts to Turkey-ize to the Turkish labor groups, we are still small and unable to grow. One would wish that the party could integrate into the Turkish society, into the Anatolian peasants, as it did with the Kurds. If we do not support the grievances of those people, we cannot reach our goal. On the other side, the system also imposes on us the position of being an ethnic party, which helps deepen the conflict between the Turks and the Kurds when necessary.

On a comparative note, it is important to stress that the level of legitimacy that the DTP (and its successor BDP from 2008 onwards) attained during the decade of 2000s cannot be equalized with the level of legitimacy that the Islamist parties achieved during the context of the TIS. First and foremost, the pro-Kurdish parties have been linked with a ‘terrorist organization’ by the former prime ministers and by the mainstream media for such long periods of time that these hostile narratives created a much more traumatic impact on ordinary citizens. Second, as discussed in Chapter 1, the Kurdish question is a much more marginalized issue than the question of Islamism in the Turkish party system, hardly influencing inter-party competition or the electoral manifestos of the mainstream parties. Still, during the momentum gained in a period desecuritizing Kurdish identity, the DTP was able to establish ties with several leftist groups and political parties in such a way that provided an alternative choice for the left-leaning electorate in 2007 elections.

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Party Goals: Vote, Office or Policy-Seeking?

As described above, both the Islamist and the pro-Kurdish parties experienced rising levels of legitimacy in the public arena as a result of the unintended consequences of the state and government policies prior to the formation of the post-Islamist and the Kurdish-led parties—the AKP and the HDP respectively. Such rising levels of legitimacy helped these parties establish initial contacts with different social groups even though such contacts were not yet able to transform these parties into mobilizational actors that could institutionalize an organized support for these parties. Chapters 3 and 4 will describe the discursive opportunity structures and the impact of the authoritarian state policies in transforming these parties into populist actors with such mobilizational capacity. This section will now outline the goals of the AKP and the HDP upon their formation. Revealing party goals upon formation is fundamental to understand why their mobilizational capacity in later stages did not end up with democratizing the regime, which will be debated more extensively in the concluding chapter (Chapter 5). The goals of individual parties (vote, policy or office-seeking) matter for the structure of inter-party competition and coalition formation processes. In less democratic contexts, party goals matter also for successful transitions and consolidation of democracy. It has been argued by LaPalombara and Weiner (1966) that in developing contexts, parties are prime agencies for the channeling of participation, national integration and the establishment of legitimacy for the prospect of democratization. They are the agents that set the conditions for the transformation of loosely organized, ideologically diffuse movements into more structured, goal-oriented bodies that have the capacity to operate within an ordered political system (Lewis 2001, 550). They help democracies survive in developmental states by making governments accountable and organizing opposition (Randall 2007, 637). Policy-seeking goals that aim at inclusive social policies on one hand, improvement of horizontal and diagonal accountability over the decision-making mechanisms on the other, would be necessary to build a healthy state-society relationship in democratizing contexts. On the other side, office-seeking goals are those that aim to maximize a given party’s control over the political office by increasing its share in government offices while vote-seeking goals are those that aim to maximize votes in elections (Strøm 1990). These party goals are not mutually

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exclusive. An office-seeking party needs to gain a certain percentage of votes to be in office. Likewise, a policy-seeking party needs to be in office to implement a given policy. Further noting, a vote or officeseeking party needs to make certain policy commitments to win votes or governmental offices. Accounting for these mutually non-exclusive features, Strøm (1990, 572) locates a given party in a three-dimensional space and shows the trade-offs among these goals. Under certain conditions, yet, one goal may be more dominant than the other two for a political party. Vote-seeking goal, for instance, may be of primary importance for a party after an electoral loss, in great electoral uncertainties or when the party is relatively smaller or younger compared to others in the party system (Meyer and Wagner 2013). In other respects, office and policy-seeking behaviors—and the payoffs between them—are often observed during coalition formation processes. What makes a party give up its policy preferences in exchange for more share in government offices in coalition agreements is often questioned in the literature (Harmel and Janda 1994; Müller and Strøm 1999; Panebianco 1988). It has, for instance, been argued that if the party organization has control over its representatives in parliament, the party is more likely to be policyseeking than office-seeking since party members are expected to be more motivated by policy payoffs than the party representatives in parliament (Strøm 1990). On the other hand, a party may continue to be a policyseeking one by moderating its policy principles to be able to take part in a winning coalition and have policy influence (Pedersen 2012). These discussions are yet situated in advanced democracy contexts. In contexts where the institutions of democracy are generally weak or in transition, the reasons for a party’s preference of one goal over another can be combined with other systemic institutional factors. Share (1999), for instance, discusses the transformation of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) from a policy-seeking toward an office-seeking party during the transition context of the 1980s. The case of the PSOE in Spain shows that an office-seeking party (1) emphasizes technocraticadministrative capability, (2) focuses on economic modernization and (3) presents a vague ideological position, accompanied with the image of a charismatic leader. Share shows the impact of the elite-driven democratic transition over the PSOE’s transformation to this end, arguing that ‘the consensus model institutionalized elite behavior in all parties that downplayed internal democracy, mass membership and policy considerations’

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(Share 1999, 103). Underlining that the negotiated transition turned the PSOE into a single, unassailable socialist party, Share (1999, 104) further notes that: Instead of a party of activists with links to trade unions and mass movements, the party was now made up mostly of professionals and paid staff. Instead of a party platform aimed at fundamental change of the system, the PSOE now had a vague ideology mostly aimed at integrating Spain to European capitalism. Instead of forty years in political exile, the PSOE enjoyed the spoils of power only five years after the first democratic elections in 1977.

These remarks on the Spanish PSOE indeed resonate with Katz and Mair’s (1995) observations on party change in Western democracies. The gradual professionalization of party organizations, the slow but decisive integration of party elites into public office and the declining influence of the extra-parliamentary branch of the party over internal decision-making processes had led Katz and Mair to conclude on the infamous ‘cartel party thesis.’ An office-seeking behavior is central to their thesis, highlighting the detachment of party organizations from society and their representative functions. While Share’s observation on the PSOE highlights the effect of Spain’s elite-driven transition context on such an outcome, Katz and Mair emphasize the effects of the reduced importance of the left– right ideological divide in traditional party competition and the transfer of control over a range of economic concerns to technocratic and largely non-partisan institutions like the EU, the WTO, IMF or the World Bank from the domain of the national governments (Katz and Mair 2018, 9). Social change, accompanied with the lessened ideological distinctiveness of parties have contributed to a constriction of the policy space and undermined the importance of policy-seeking goals in inter-party interactions and rivalries (Katz and Mair 2018, 83–94). The rise of global liberalism, the downfall of socialism and the decline of welfare policies aimed at redistribution at the global level have interacted with the contextual dynamics of Turkish party politics in its own way. The goal of the AKP as a post-Islamist party was shaped both by international and contextual factors: It was an office-seeking party upon formation, with the goal to integrate into global markets, govern effectively and reshape the Turkish state structure. The HDP, on the other side, was born as a policy-seeking party at the national level; with the aim

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to bring a new and inclusive understanding of ‘the left’ back to the public sphere via merging the fate of the Kurdish minority with those of other excluded groups and the workers. In the Kurdish political region, yet, the HDP was shaped more by Turkey’s contextual dynamics and born as an office-seeking party, with the goal to sustain its control over the municipal offices in the region, continuing to emphasize ethnonationalism and self-governance. 2.2.1

The Birth of the AKP as an Office-Seeking Party

In this section, I argue that the emergence of the AKP resembles the birth of an office-seeking party at the national level rather than a vote or policy-seeking party based on the above description. The domestic and international context within which the party was formed was conducive to the establishment of a predominant party with an office-seeking goal. I argue that the AKP’s formation process including the way the activists started filling in the posts within the party organization and the charisma of Erdogan demonstrate it primarily as an office-seeking party rather than a policy-seeking one. The AKP leadership continuously stressed effective governance, gave a competent image while the ambiguity and incoherence were inherent in party ideology. The above-mentioned global conditions that Katz and Mair talk about in their ‘cartel party thesis’ heavily relate to the Turkish political context, which generated the Islamist-successor AKP as a new victorious party in 2002. The international pressure on the side of the EU and the IMF to further incorporate Turkey into free-market capitalism was similar to the Spanish context of the 1980s. An economic crisis had paved the way for the success of parties that emphasized stability, competence and neoliberal integration with global markets. In this way, the AKP won the elections in 2002 as a ‘single, unassailable’ party, similar to the PSOE in the 1980s in Spain. A second factor conducive to the birth of an office-seeking party was the removal of the RP (the Islamist predecessor of the AKP) from office through military coercion in 1997. This experience led the founding elite of the AKP to focus more on a discourse of ‘capability to serve to the people’ and ‘democracy’ with radically less emphasis on religion and Islamism (Somer 2007). The party pushed its affiliation with religion to the background, and prioritized effective governance similar to the agenda of the single-party governments of Turkish political history,

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most notably the ANAP in the 1980s, the DP in the 1950s and the AP in the 1960s. Finally, a third factor that is associated with the outcome of an officeseeking party was the constitutional and legal framework in Turkey, which inhibits the development of internal democracy within political parties. Even though the AKP was born with a relatively democratic party statute, the first thing the party leadership accomplished after winning a landslide victory was to change the party bylaws in a way that emphasized loyalty to the party leader. The change eliminated any potential constraint of the party organization over the office-seeking behavior of the party elites. The aforementioned factors, namely, ‘economic liberalization,’ ‘state repression,’ ‘internal power structure of the party’ are often used to explain Islamist party moderation (from a radically Islamist RP to a moderate-Islamist AKP). However, rather than causing a moderation in ideology or in the policy platform of a party, below, I show that these factors, were effective in producing an office-seeking party out of a party which primarily had a policy-seeking agenda based on the Just Order (Adil Düzen). To a certain degree, the RP was also a vote-seeking party seeking votes sometimes from the Turkish nationalist and sometimes from the Kurdish constituency. Economic liberalization: When the AKP emerged as a new ‘conservative democratic’ party under the leadership of Erdo˘gan, the centrist politics in the country had collapsed. The political parties of the center-right and the center-left had suffered from legitimacy crises as a result of a series of sensational incidents and corruption scandals—such as the notorious Susurluk incident in 1996 (Baykan 2018, 46). The left, on the other side, had already declined throughout the 1980s and the 1990s. Toward the end of the 1990s, the center-left policy agendas could hardly emerge even when a social democratic party, the DSP, was a major coalition partner in government from 1999 to 2001. The void of left-wing policies that could address the grievances of the poor urban masses was rather filled with the rise of the Islamist RP that had managed to show a competent image in running the major municipalities of Ankara and Istanbul. According to the interviewee, Recep Tayyip Erdogan had become the mayor of Istanbul in 1994 and was a rising star within the party organization, bringing enthusiasm to the RP’s grassroot activism unlike the party leader, Necmettin Erbakan. The RP, through the slogan of Just Order, was a party to solve the problem of ‘crisis of morals’ by establishing an Islamic community and argued that the Western orientation

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of the Turkish political regime was the reason for the rising problems of the society (Eligür 2010, 163–164). According to the party, the charging of an interest rate and unfair taxes were leading to the enslavement of Turkey. It regarded capitalism as a system of slavery that erases traditional values. Just Order based on Islam resembled social democracy in economic terms, advocating equal income distribution and moral obligation to improve the material position of the poor. Indeed, the RP was implementing the Just Order in the municipalities that it took control. It provided free social services, such as medical services, hospitals coal and food assistance, free public transportation for students, scholarships, dormitories, elderly houses, community housing and so on (Eligür 2010, 172–173). On the other side, the period in which Erdo˘gan served as the mayor of Istanbul, between 1994 and 1998, was occupied with political crises at the national level, in which the military-bureaucratic state elite problematized the RP’s growing electoral success in local and national elections. The political parties, people’s movements and the state elite representing the secularist alliance in the country heavily contested the premiership of Necmettin Erbakan when the RP became a major coalition partner between 1996 and 1997. The centrist parties that came to power after the military ousted the RP from power in 1997, also failed to implement sound socioeconomic policies in response to the rising problems of inequality, unemployment and poverty. This period ended up with the worst economic crisis in modern Turkish history. The beginning of the millennium in Turkey resembled a transition context, which signified the importance of effective governance in the first place. As Öni¸s and Keyman (2003) explain, when the AKP won a landslide victory in 2002 under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, it did so ‘reordering Turkey’s parliament and political landscape and leaving every other party except Kemal Atatürk’s old CHP shut completely out of that institution.’ Similar to the experience of the Spanish PSOE, whose goal had shifted from being an advocate of participatory democracy to a desire to create ‘Things Well Done’ in the 1980s, the AKP was born as a party emphasizing competence, economic stability and democracy as a long-term solution to Turkey’s problems. Just as Co¸sar and Özman (2004) argued, a market-based approach dominated the economic preferences of the party on the basis of privatization and compliance with the criteria determined by the IMF, while it had a rather confusing approach to democracy. The party not only adhered to the

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liberal democratic model through emphasizing the importance of individual liberties and rights, Turkey’s accession to the EU; but also took an organic approach to society via emphasizing ‘service to the nation’ and ‘conservative democracy’ which became a representative label for the party’s self-definition of political identity (Akdo˘gan 2003). In short: … in its ideological posture, …the party’s stance might be considered to pave the way for a ‘Third Way’[which] should not recall the synthesis between neo-liberal and social-democratic politics that it did in the homeland of the term, but between neo-liberal and religio-conservative values. (Co¸sar and Özman 2004, 67)

Moreover, the AKP’s neoliberal policies were embraced at the global level and promoted by key international institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank and the EU (Öni¸s 2012). The AKP took opportunity of the 2001 crisis to capitalize on economic reforms, which was going to help the party maintain the support of the international institutions, business groups and the liberal intelligentsia who were uneager to experience another period of coalition governments formed by the old long-standing parties that failed to integrate the country into global markets. The desire for stability and a new and clean era overshadowed the AKP’s need for a coherent ideology. Only few days before the 2002 national election, a renowned columnist and public intellectual, Hasan Cemal wrote that: Ahead of substantial foreign policy decisions on issues such as the war in Iraq, Cyprus question and the EU, the election on November 3rd is a very critical one. Turkey’s future will be bright once we welcome a strong government that can ensure stability.13

One of the founding members of the party, Ya¸sar Yakı¸s, stated in a public note that the AKP was founded as a response to the ‘public opinion which is itself in search for something new,’ ‘new faces,’ ‘new discourses’ and added that ‘there is no need to try to associate this party with any party of the past or the present. It is created with its own initiative and open to a very wide spectrum’ across the country.14 When the local party activists from the year 2007 were asked to describe the ideology of their party or why they joined the party, indeed, there was no solid elaboration of ideas but rather a common reference to a ‘party that serves the people,’ a ‘party that can effectively govern.’ Some

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of the respondents, without much elaboration, referred to the term, ‘conservative democracy’ since it was publicly declared as the official ideology of the party but all in all the AKP was more of a ‘party that worked for the people’ for the activists. R18 from Diyarbakır for instance as a response to the question on party ideology in 2007 stated that: The AKP is a party of democrats, it appeals to everyone from every segment of the society. It aspires for freedom and peace.

Another AKP local party activist (member of a local district board), R15 in Izmir made similar remarks even though he was a former member of the MHP. He explained that: I joined the AKP because I had a desire to be successful and serve to my people. I think the only way to do something good for Turkey now is to be with the AKP... I think it is a party that finally does something solid and visible for the country.

R30 from Mersin in 2007 even made a more general remark, stating that: The ideology of the party is reflected in the party’s emblem: It is the light bulb… it refers to enlightenment, justice and development.

Many activists also referred to the competence of the party leader as a reason for joining the AKP. In the words of R23 from Istanbul in 2007: I did not have any relationship with a party before the AKP was established. My family is not involved in politics either. I witnessed the service that Erdogan did to Istanbul when he was a mayor. We love and respect him, and we know how much can be achieved under his leadership.

The same respondent then stated, ‘the AKP means service to me.’ Repressive State: The AKP was formed out of the reformist faction (yenilikçiler) within the Islamist RP/FP. Up until the military intervention that took place on 28 February 1997, Erbakan’s leadership was not questioned in the party. With increasing electoral success in the 1990s, the RP appeared as a party with the largest number of votes in 1995 general elections and formed a coalition government with the centerright DYP. Necmettin Erbakan became the prime minister of Turkey as the leader of the Islamist Milli Görü¸s (National View) movement. The

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uncompromising attitude of a military-bureaucratic state on the RP, yet, removed the party from power through a military intervention, closed down the party and banned the party leader from political life. The question of who was going to be the new leader to the successor party was a major problem: if the new leader was going to be one of the young leading activists, among whom Erdogan was the strongest candidate due to the support he received from the grassroots, it would signal a significant change for the party.15 Yet, Erbakan chose his loyal friend Kutan and made a call for obedience to his decision among the activists. As a result of this choice, Arınç and Erdo˘gan as well as other parliamentarian activists supporting them showed a big hesitation to join the newly established FP in replacement of the RP.16 Yet, they did join and what followed afterward was a major decline in the votes of the party by seven percentage. The FP entered the parliament only as an opposition. The military intervention and the electoral setback intensified an internal conflict between Erbakan supporters and the reformist activists, such as Recep Tayyip Erdo˘gan, Abdullah Gül, Abdulkadir Aksu and Bülent Arınç (Ayan Musil and Dikici Bilgin 2016). Due to the setback, the reformists for the first time explicitly mentioned that Erbakan had to give up his influence over the party and demanded major changes within the party: change in leadership, organizational tactics and party discourse.17 When the reformists could not take over control over the party organization, most notably after losing the intra-party leadership selection during the party congress on 14 May 2000 and the FP was closed down in 2001 by a court decision following the headscarf crisis in parliament, the reformists established their own party, the AKP, whereas Erbakan’s traditionalists (gelenekçiler) established the SP. In 2002 national elections, the AKP received 34.3 percent, while SP only 2.5 percent. Several party activists presented their initial reason for joining the AKP in 2018 as the firm belief in the ‘success of the party’ or the ‘leader’ rather than ideological attachment. R1, former provincial board member from Kayseri stated that: I was one of the founders of the AKP in Kayseri in 2001. We, the local founders, used to be part of the National View tradition, but then we thought Tayyip Bey was going to be more successful than Saadet Partisi (SP). That’s why we continued with him. Our goal was service to the country. Saadet Partisi had no chance left, when Erbakan was out.

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In this response, it is also possible to see an emphasis on party leadership as the reason to work for a political party. While Erbakan’s influence seems to be evident to be an activist for the parties of the Milli Görü¸s tradition, Erdo˘gan [Tayyip Bey] seemed to have a similar influence over the activists that joined the AKP. Both the party’s and the leader’s association with religion were important but not as much as the competence of the leader. R3 also states the competence of the leader as the main reason for joining the AKP during the split with the SP in the following way: Erbakan did not stand up against the February 28 process. Even on the day of the party closure, he thought that the party would not be dissolved. He was living in an imaginary world. AK party was established to reach out the masses. Also, Erbakan’s faction had his own cadres in the party and we could not be part of it.

Hence, during the military intervention and the closure of Erbakan’s parties (the RP and the FP), there were activists who were not happy with Erbakan’s submissive image against the military and the Court decisions. Erdo˘gan was a different type of leader who would not accept such submission and in the words of R3, would ‘stand up against the state’ (dik durmak). The experience of the Islamist parties with a repressive state cultivated the importance of ‘competence and capability’ of the leader among the activists. While the moderation literature refers to ‘learning’ as a factor that explains party change vis-à-vis an uncompromising state elite, it does so through a focus on change from radical ideas to moderate ideas (Wickham 2004). However, the responses of the interviewees on the case of the AKP show that the change through ‘learning’ is not about having a transition toward more moderate ideas but rather toward a desire for a more capable and competent party leadership that can ‘win’ the struggle against the uncompromising state. According to the results of a public opinion survey conducted in Istanbul, and published in Milliyet on May 25, 1998, Recep Tayyip Erdo˘gan, indeed was the most popular politician of Turkey among a list of 42 names.18 According to the survey, as the mayor of Istanbul, he had the support of 15 percent of the respondents while only 6 percent supported Erbakan. Bülent Ecevit, the leader of the center-left DSP, followed him by 7.6 percent while Mesut Yılmaz, the prime minister and leader of ANAP, received only 4.6 percent of support. R13 stated that:

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Since 1994, in every place he visited, Erdo˘gan was welcomed in the RP as if he was the prime minister although it was Erbakan who was leading the party. He was young and idealist. He was very successful as an Istanbul mayor. The members had endorsed Erdo˘gan as the future party leader and prime minister.

Internal Autocracy within the AKP: Another factor that contributed to the birth of the AKP with an office-seeking strategy was the lack of internal party democracy. The political culture and political institutions—most importantly the Turkish Party Law (TPL)—in Turkey institutionalizes elite behavior in all political parties, downplaying their mass characteristics (Ayan Musil and Vašenda 2020; Ayan 2010). This was also the case for the AKP’s Islamist predecessors, the RP and the FP. Despite their mass characteristics and attachment to a religious mass movement, the party leader, Necmettin Erbakan, had established his domination over the party organization through developing an extensive grassroots clientelistic network (Ayan Musil and Dikici Bilgin 2016, 177; Ayata 1996). Ironically, when the AKP was born, the party made it clear that it would be ‘a party of first times and principles (ilkler ve ilkeler partisi)’ and paid attention to the discourse of internal party democracy like no other Turkish party earlier did.19 This was mainly because the party itself had emerged as a splinter party when the reformist faction within the FP could not remove Erbakan’s traditionalist dominant faction from power during the party’s leadership elections in 2000. As the reformists themselves were the victims of internal party autocracy, the leader of the newly founded AKP, Recep Tayyip Erdo˘gan, stated ‘nothing will be similar to the past (hiçbir ¸sey eskisi gibi olmayacak),’ referring to the ‘ultra-democratic’ nature of his new party organization: ‘This party will not be ruled by the dictatorship of one leader. All positions in the party, from top leadership to local chairmanship, or from deputies in parliament, to the deputies in municipal council, will be determined in accordance with the party statute.’20 The AKP bylaws established ‘party democracy arbitration committees’ to identify the means of solving the conflicts between party members and the boards (AKP 2002, Article 101). However, the discourse on internal party democracy did not overlap with the behavior of the AKP leadership, who transformed the party organization from a democratic to an ‘authoritarian structure’ in less than a year (Ayan 2010). The party bylaws changed right after the party came

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to power. The internal voting methods changed in favor of the leader, who could now set up his own central party team. The executive board members were now going to be appointed by the party chairs both at the local and central level rather than being elected by the members of the party organization.21 A former AKP parliamentarian (2002–2007), R2, explained the autocratization of the party structure in the following way: It happened step-by-step but in a very speedy manner: First, the founding board of the party (Kurucular Kurulu-KK) (composed of 72 founders and about 40-45 parliamentarians) decided to change the candidate selection procedure. Candidate selection used to be organized through primaries. The local party chairs had weight in the process. In the national convention of 2003, the mandate was given to the Central Executive Board (Merkez Karar Yönetim Kurulu-MKYK). The justification was that ‘the primaries would not provide healthy results because the members did not know each other well.’ The party leadership uttered such words to the parliamentarians during the debates: ‘I cannot entrust you to the will of district chairs.’ Only three people (including myself) disagreed with changing this procedure. I told the crowd, ‘this decision will turn our party into a party of the leader,’ but nobody listened. Moreover, the parliamentary group chair in the party used to be elected through a secret vote among the elected parliamentarians. This procedure changed as well in November 2002. The justification was that the MPs did not know each other well and there should not be a conflict between the parliamentary group and the party organization. Third, the delegates of the party congress used to nominate party members for the central executive board and vote for these members in an open list (çar¸saf liste). This provision changed in 2006. Instead, it was decided that the party chair would make a bloc list of 50 nominees to be voted during the party congress.

Hence, within a couple of years, the AKP was no more an internally democratic party. Even though, the party bylaws were democratic in the beginning and the party leadership heavily used a discourse of internal party democracy in 2001, the party did not operate in a democratic way in practice. The constraint of the party organization over the decisions of the party leadership was quickly eliminated, which helped the consolidation of an office-seeking rather than a policy-seeking strategy for the party.

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2.3 The Birth of the HDP Both as an Office and a Policy-Seeking Party In a recent study on the HDP, Alptekin (2021) argues that the HDP embraces a moderate, universal rights-based, pro-Turkey (Türkiyeci) discourse in its campaign in western Turkish districts, while adopting an identity-based and, at times, a radical pro-PKK discourse in its campaigns in the eastern Turkish districts. Alptekin’s observation on the difference between the eastern and western wings of the HDP overlaps with the argument that I want to present in this section: The HDP was born as a Kurdish-successor party in 2012 with a nationwide policy-oriented agenda focusing on an all-embracing rights-based agenda compared to its predecessors. But in the eastern region of Turkey, where the majority of the Kurds live, the party has an office-seeking goal. This is closely related with the fact that the armed wing of the Kurdish movement, the PKK, continues to exert political influence over the Kurdish political region and constrain the autonomy of the legal pro-Kurdish parties (Ayan Musil and Maze 2021). When describing the indicators of an office-seeking party for the AKP in the above section, I underlined two criteria based on the extant literature: ‘the party’s stress on effective governance and competence’ and ‘ideological incoherence.’ These criteria can also be discussed in the case of the HDP, with regard to the duality in its goals: one specific to the Kurdish political region and the other to the national level. ‘Kurdish political region’ is a term coined by Çiçek (2017, 158) and refers to a region in which Kurdishness refers to a political identity rather than a cultural one, where a remarkable sociopolitical mobilization is in existence and where the pro-Kurdish parties have had significant electoral power: While the Kurdish political region emerged in the 1990s, it was consolidated in the 2000s and is comprised of 16 provinces in the east and southeast of Turkey: Ardahan, Kars, I˘gdır, A˘grı, Tunceli, Bingöl, Mu¸s, Bitlis, Van, Diyarbakır, Batman, Siirt, Hakkari, Sırnak, ¸ Mardin, Sanlıurfa ¸ (Çiçek 2017, 172). Using the evidence of national election results, Çiçek shows that in provinces like Diyarbakır, Hakkari, Mardin and Sırnak, ¸ the proKurdish parties almost have hegemonic power, whereas in others, it either acts as a hegemonic power balancer or a powerful opposition. Given that the electoral dynamics specific to the Kurdish political region are very different from national electoral dynamics, it is justifiable to expect also a duality in party goals.

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Historically, the emergence of the contemporary Kurdish political movement was due to ideological motivations. As Güne¸s (2012) aptly explains, the Kurdish activists in the east of Turkey started uniting around the critique of the state’s assimilation policies and the call for recognizing the Kurdish cultural and linguistic differences. They allied with the leftist unions and associations willing to promote the demands of the Kurdish people within the framework of equality and constitutional rights. On the other side, the fractionalization of the leftist movement and factional infightings led some Kurds to establish specifically Kurdish revolutionary organizations. The 1971 military intervention interrupted their activities. The military court heavily repressed the leftist organizations including those in alliance with the Kurds. Some activists tried in courts argued that the Kurds’ origins were not Turkic while the military court saw Kurds essentially of Turkish origin (Güne¸s 2012, 69–70). The military coup in 1980, on the other hand, closed the avenues of nonviolent Kurdish political activism in the 1980s. According to Tezcür (2015) the aggravated collective Kurdish grievances legitimized the PKK’s violent strategy. The PKK’s political and military activities throughout the 1980s and the early 1990s increased Kurdish political mobilization in Turkey and beyond (Güne¸s 2012, 122). While Kurdish ethnonationalist ideology is what constitutes the core of the struggle of legal pro-Kurdish parties, the PKK, as the rebel wing of the party, also has desire for power vis-àvis the authority of the state since the emergence of the Kurdish political region. Marcus (2007, 178) based on an extensive fieldwork notes this power element in the following words: The PKK had supplanted more than the state’s authority, Kurds in the region were used to appealing to local, influential figures—tribal leaders, sheikhs, and wealthy landowners—for help on addressing everyday family problems and adjudicating other disputes. Now, in areas where the PKK was strong, Kurds instead appealed to the rebels… As such they were more trusted and respected than the traditional authority figures—even those with no ties to the state—who symbolized the nonnationalist, nonrevolutionary forces that so far had failed the Kurds.

The power element in the Kurdish movement took a different turn when the HEP, the first legal pro-Kurdish party was established on 7 June 1990. Even though it provided an opportunity for the Kurds who hoped

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to be involved only in a legal struggle as opposed to the illegal activities of the PKK, Marcus explains that later on the PKK influence over the party was inevitable both through determining the party cadres and shaping its ideology in line with the PKK’ fight (2007, 160–163). On the other side, thanks to the establishment of the pro-Kurdish party, the Kurdish problem was finally promoted by a legal entity which incorporated formerly marginalized activists into mainstream political arenas’ and ‘helped routinize pro-Kurdish discourse in the public sphere’ (Watts 2006, 133). The PKK and the pro-Kurdish parties shared the same ideology and social basis in the Kurdish political region. As one HDP deputy (E7) explained in an interview, The PKK and the party have had the same social roots. The PKK emerged as an illegal armed movement prior to the formation of the legal wing of the same movement… However, the party is not the organic addressee of the PKK and it has never been possible to debate the relationship between the state, the PKK, and our party within the legal framework.

Another party activist (E13), further adds that: Many of our own voters have children in the PKK, and they vote for us because we are dealing with the same issues that their children are, but in a different way. Oftentimes, the state wants to criminalize the HDP and attests a link with the PKK, but really we just have a different attitude on Kurdish issues, so the state uses propaganda to attack us.

Through sharing his personal experience, the same respondent also states that the PKK and the HDP share the same societal and ideological roots in the Kurdish political region, but the fact that one is an illegal armed movement and the other is a legal political party provides a choice for those between joining the armed or the non-armed struggle for the same cause: I was born in Kurdistan and lived there until high school. My childhood was during the 1990s, which were the intense years of the armed conflict. My family was also part of the opposition movements. Some joined the party. Some joined the PKK.

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The fact that the political party and the PKK are originally two different wings of the same movement, seem to have complicated the evolution of the Kurdish parties and their goals. The PKK’s influence over the voters and members of the party in the Kurdish political region separates the organizational structure of the movement that in the end leads to a divergence in party goals at the national and the Kurdish regional level. As Çiçek (2017, 172–178) shows in his study of the Kurdish political region, the change in the organizational structure of the pro-Kurdish parties as of 2011 is based on a ‘dual strategy’ for the movement: The Peoples’ Democratic Congress (HDK—Halklarin Demokratik Kongresi) was established as an umbrella organization of various leftist groups while the Kurdish-led HDP became the national parliamentary wing of the movement. In other words, the national representatives of the Kurdish movement formed the HDP. Democratic Regions Party (DBP—Demokratik Bölgeler Partisi), on the other side, acts as its regional counterpart and represents the Democratic Society Congress (DTK—Demokratik Toplum Kongresi), which is a platform of civil society organizations, minor parties and members of ethnic, religious, political groups. The goal of the DBP is to promote an autonomous political and administrative space in the Kurdish region and participates in elections under the HDP umbrella. The eight stars in the DBP’s flag symbolize eight themes for ‘democratic autonomy’: political, legislative, self-defense, cultural, social, economic, ecological and diplomatic (Çiçek 2017). The ‘democratic autonomy’ project aims to advance the Kurdish people’s capacity for self-government in their homeland. While the HDP aims at the ‘Turkeyization’ of the Kurdish movement via merging with the left-wing opposition groups at the national level, the DBP signifies the Kurdish self-government in the Kurdish political region. Indeed, since their formation, the pro-Kurdish parties, through offering candidates in local elections, started controlling several municipal offices in the Kurdish political region. Figure 2.2 shows how the pro-Kurdish parties increasingly won mayoral offices over time in the provinces within the Kurdish political region, either through forming an electoral alliance with the social democratic SHP (such as in 1994 and 2004 local elections) or on their own. Among the indicators of an office-seeking strategy discussed above is the stress on ‘effective governance’ rather than a coherent policy platform. In the case of the eastern-regional wing of the HDP (represented by the DBP), we observe an overlap between a Kurdish nationalist

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1989 Mayoral Elections in the Kurdish Political Region

SHP

ANAP

RP

DYP

Independent

1994 Mayoral Elections in the Kurdish Political Region

SHP

ANAP

RP

DYP

Independent

Kurdish Party

2004 Mayoral Elections in the Kurdish Political Region

SHP

1999 Mayoral Elections in the Kurdish Political Region

SHP

ANAP

FP

DYP

Independent

Kurdish Party

MHP

CHP

MHP

CHP

AKP

2009 Mayoral Elections in the Kurdish Political Region

Independent

MHP

SP

Kurdish Party

MHP

CHP

AKP

2014 Mayoral Elections in the Kurdish Political Region

Independent

Kurdish Party

MHP

CHP

AKP

Fig. 2.2 Comparison of Mayoral Election Results in the Provinces within the Kurdish Political Region (1989–2014) (Note The figures show each party’s ratio with regard to the number of provincial offices [not district offices] gained in the elections. The provinces include Agri, Batman, Bingol, Bitlis, Diyarbakir, Hakkari, Igdir, Kars, Mardin, Mus, Sanliurfa, Sirnak, Tunceli, Van. The 1989 elections exclude Batman, Igdir, Sirnak while 1994 and 1999 elections exclude Batman)

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ideology and stress on governance. In other words, the ideology itself encompasses an ethnonationalist understanding based on an autonomous self-government in the region, which is the outcome of years of state repression over the Kurdish identity and the armed struggle for the selfdetermination rights of the Kurds. In contrast with the evolution of the Islamist parties (from the RP to the FP and to the AKP) whose strategy changed from being the advocates of an Islamist platform to offering an incoherent, all-encompassing platform for the goal of gaining office, what we observe in the case of the pro-Kurdish party is the continuation of an office-seeking strategy in the Kurdish political region as a result of its ideological emphasis on Kurdish self-determination rights. The state repression, neither through the dissolution of Kurdish-successor parties nor through the imprisonment of party officials had made an impact on this strategy because of the embeddedness of the office-seeking goal in an ethnonationalist ideology. In fact, the office-seeking goal can be considered as an outcome of the PKK’s renunciation of its early secessionist goal to establish a socialist Kurdish state and adoption of the idea of ‘Democratic Solution of the Kurdish Question’ without threatening the territorial integrity of the Turkish State (Öcalan 1999). This change in goals, rather than being a result of state repression, was rather related with the global developments, such as the fall of the Soviet Union and the capture of the PKK leader, Öcalan. As E12 explains in an interview, ‘the change in ideas [from secessionism toward democratic autonomy) emerged in 1996 as a result of the fall of the communism and the enthusiasm for change intensified in 1999. We realized that a polity ruled by the proletariat could also be oppressive and started questioning the need for a state. The Kurdish movement was in a soul-searching process after Öcalan was captured.’ E3 also emphasized that, ‘we took lessons from the collapse of the Soviet Union. We need to follow such global developments. If we focus only on the success of the Kurdish movement itself, it cannot make any progress.’ E11, influenced by the ideas of Öcalan, further states that ‘Apo [Öcalan] says that the era of nation-state is coming to an end and the European integration is the proof. He argues that the nation-state can turn into an oppressive apparatus over time; but we should rather aim at establishing and sustaining democracy within Turkey. This will give us the rights and freedoms we are seeking.’ This respondent, later in the interview, expresses his own view in the following way: ‘Even though an

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independent Kurdistan is still in our hearts, there is first a need for democratization. Democracy will show us whether we can harmoniously live together or not.’ Hence, the idea of democracy or democratization is most of the time understood as the self-determination rights of the Kurds, which is no more based on the idea of secessionism but rather on obtaining the autonomy needed for self-governance at the regional level. Indeed, as Al (2015, 106) argues, the political goal of Kurdish nationalism, first and foremost, has always been the recognition and advancement of a distinct Kurdish identity, which did not mean that a form of autonomy or local governance was not an option for their demands. ‘The resolution process’ that was undertaken between the ruling AKP and the pro-Kurdish political bloc that included both the PKK and the legal pro-Kurdish party (the BDP and later the HDP) also demanded the granting of the collective rights of Turkey’s Kurds and adoption of a form of self-rule in Turkish Kurdistan as prerequisites for disarmament (Yadirgi 2017, 231). On the other side of the coin, the HDP at the national level focuses on the rhetoric of the inclusivity of all the excluded and the oppressed in society, including the rights of minorities that were not officially recognized as such and the rights of the marginalized such as the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex (LGBTI). It strives to be a party of Turkey by embracing issues other than the Kurdish rights. Since the political parties in government and opposition could not produce leftwing policies for long, it filled an important vacuum in Turkish politics: the left-libertarian policy space (Celep 2014). With regard to the situation of internal party democracy within the HDP, Celep (2021) in a recent survey research shows that the HDP, among the four major parties of Turkey, is distinguishable by a considerable number of criteria that it fulfills for internal party democracy, such as gender equality/awareness, co-presidency, representative resemblance (particularly of LGBTIs, non-Muslims and the non-religious), freedom of expression/dissent, decentralization of power, inclusiveness and democratic candidate selection. However, he also notes that one should be cautious with regard to the high scores this party receives for internal party democracy (Celep 2021, 777) because ‘the HDP’s leadership politics is not restricted to the formal co-presidents’ and that ‘the Kurdish left’s leading figures include first and foremost Abdullah Öcalan, the PKK leader.’ In fact, 11 out of 20 respondents within the HDP umbrella during my interviews in the year 2018 emphasized the influence of Öcalan

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on party ideology and strategy. The project of ‘democratic autonomy’ is rooted in the post-2005 writings of the leader of the movement, Abdullah Öcalan, who developed the idea of ‘autonomous bottom-up communal self-organization as an alternative to the state-oriented doctrines of both liberal capitalism and bolshevik communism,’ while rejecting what he called Turkish ‘Jacobinism,’ that he defined as a bourgeois rule through a (nation) state (Leezenberg 2016, 677). In the words of E2, Öcalan is the ‘ideologue of the party.’ In the words of E13, it was Öcalan who ‘asserted that different communities (not only the Kurdish community) in Turkey needed to be democratized as well.’ Hence, even though the HDP is ‘the strongest agency of leftlibertarian politics in Turkey’ (Celep 2021, 793) and resembles a policy-seeking party with a strong democratizing agenda to transform the monolithic, nationalist and centrist structure of the Turkish state, its emphasis on the ‘self-governance’ in the Kurdish political region in which it has hegemonic control over several municipalities, and the influence of the rebel group leader over the inner workings and ideology of the party provide the justifications for its office-seeking strategy in the eastern part of Turkey. Last but not least, it is also possible to find ideological inconsistency in the party discourse at certain moments at the regional and national level. For instance, one of the HDP activists (E2) mentioned how the LGBTI discourse of the party at the national level sometimes threatens the votes of the HDP in conservative, Kurdishpopulated provinces. During the national elections of 2015 and 2018, as E2 explains, one of the MP candidates of the HDP in a western province was openly gay. He further adds that: … one night in 2018, the provincial branch of the AKP attempted to disseminate leaflets about this gay candidate throughout A˘grı in order to provoke the conservative supporters of the HDP. On the leaflets, the AKP in a very sexist manner was stating that, ‘look at your party… it campaigns on gay rights and nominates a gay candidate for the Turkish parliament.’ Early in the morning, our party [HDP] activists were collecting these leaflets in the streets.

This anecdote above also shows the HDP’s principal internal dilemma and the main challenge that it faces in trying to accommodate all the differences in one single-party platform as a part of its policy-seeking goal of Turkey-ization.

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Notes 1. This is a definition of the Kurdish Opening by Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. https://carnegieendowment.org/2009/12/ 01/kurdish-opening-in-turkey-origins-and-future-event-1494, accessed 1 September 2020. 2. According to Mair (1994, 4), ‘party on the ground’ is one of the three elements of a party organization and refers to the members and loyal party voters. The other two elements are the ‘party in central office,’ which comprises of the leadership cadre that represents the party on the ground and ‘the party in public office,’ which is the element of the party that is government or in parliament. The more a party wishes to influence what goes on in society, on the ground, the more it needs a mass membership (Mair 1994, 15). 3. Ulema was a powerful class in the Ottoman Empire, composed of religious teachers of the Islamic community, theologians, lawyers, judges, professors and high state religious officials even having an influence over the decision-making process. For a comprehensive literature review of the secularization policies of the early Republican elite between 1923 and 1946, see Eligür (2010, 41–48). 4. Ru¸sen Çakir, “30 YILDAN HATIRLADIKLARIM/7 20 Ekim 1991 Genel Seçimleri: Baraja kar¸sı Erbakan-Türke¸s ittifakı,” 15 February 2015. http://rusencakir.com/30-YILDAN-HATIRLADIKLARIM7-20-Ekim1991-Genel-Secimleri-Baraja-karsi-Erbakan-Turkes-ittifaki/5110, accessed 1 September 2020. 5. “Asrın Notları: 1994 Diyarbakır Konu¸sması Fragman,” 23 December 2014, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZSdaHODSgE, accessed 10 September 2020. 6. Refah Partisi, Prof. Dr. Necmettin Erbakan’ın Basın Toplantısı, 26 December 1995. 7. “1991’deki yemin krizi süreci 10 yıl hapisle sonuçlanmı¸stı!” 17 November 2015, T24, https://t24.com.tr/haber/1991deki-yemin-krizi-sureci-10yil-hapisle-sonuclanmisti-316967, accessed 10 September 2020. 8. “Kürt sorunu benim sorunum,” Hürriyet, 12 August 2005, https://www. hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/kurt-sorunu-benim-sorunum-341847, accessed 10 September 2020. 9. “PKK için canlı kalkan olacaklar,” GazeteVatan, 1 September 2004, http://www.gazetevatan.com/pkk-icin-canli-kalkan-olacaklar-35041-gun dem/, accessed 10 September 2020. 10. Ibid. 11. These are indicated in the DTP’s party program in the year 2005, pp. 35– 39.

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12. “Turkey-ization” was the name of the strategy to transform the party “from a Kurdish-identity–based provincial party into a national party of the democratic left—aimed to represent and unite the country’s marginalized groups.” See Tepe and Alemdaro˘glu (2021, 97). 13. Hasan Cemal, “Sezer, Tayyip Erdo˘gan, Yeni Ba¸sbaban!” Milliyet, 31 October 2002, p. 17. 14. NTV, “Yenilikçiler resmen partile¸sti,” 15 August 2001. http://arsiv.ntv. com.tr/news/99451.asp, accessed 19 May 2021. 15. “Emanetçi mi Degisim mi?” Hürriyet, 23 February 1998. 16. “Erbakan’a Rest: Artik Eskisi Gibi Olamaz Hocam,” Hürriyet, 24 February 1998. 17. “FP’de Tepeden Tirnaga Degisim,” Hürriyet, 24 April 1999. 18. “Erdo˘gan Hoca’yı geçti,” Milliyet, 25 May 1998, p. 16. 19. NTV, “Erdogan: Hiçbir s¸ey eskisi gibi olmayacak,” 14 August 2001, http://arsiv.ntv.com.tr/news/99845.asp, accessed 19 May 2021. 20. Ibid. 21. For details of the changes in the AKP bylaws in 2003; see columns of Tarhan Erdem in Radikal published on 30 January 2003; 4 February 2003; 21 October 2003.

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Meyer, T. M., and M. Wagner. 2013. “Mainstream or Niche? Vote-Seeking Incentives and the Programmatic Strategies of Political Parties.” Comparative Political Studies 40 (10): 1246–1272. Müller, W. C., and K. Strøm. 1999. Policy, Office, or Votes : How Political Parties in Western Europe Make Hard Decisions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Öcalan, A. 1999. “Declaration on the Democratic Solution of the Kurdish Question: The Defence Arguments That the Head of the PKK Abdullah Öcalan Presented at ‘The Trial of the Century.’” Öni¸s, Z. 2012. “The Triumph of Conservative Globalism: The Political Economy of the AKP Era.” Turkish Studies 13 (2): 135–52. Öni¸s, Z., and E. F. Keyman. 2003. “Turkey at the Polls: A New Path Emerges.” Journal of Democracy 14 (2): 95–107. Özbudun, E., and A. Kazancıgil. 1981. Atatürk: Founder of a Modern State. London: Archon Books. Özdalga, E. (2006). “The Hidden Arab: A Critical Reading of the Notion of ‘Turkish Islam.’” Middle Eastern Studies 42 (4): 551–70. Özpek, B. B. 2017. The Peace Process Between Turkey and the Kurds: Anatomy of a Failure. London: Routledge. Panebianco, A. 1988. Political Parties: Organization and Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pedersen, H. H. 2012. “Policy-Seeking Parties in Multiparty Systems: Influence or Purity?” Party Politics 18 (3): 297–314. Pelt, M. 2008. “Adnan Menderes, Islam, and His Conflict with the One-Party Era Establishment.” In Religion, Politics, and Turkey’s EU Accession, edited by D. Jung and C. Raudvere, 91–113. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Poguntke, T. (2006). “Political Parties and Other Organizations.” In Handbook of Party Politics, edited by R. S. Katz and W. Crotty, 396–405. London: Sage. Polat, R. K. 2009. “The 2007 Parliamentary Elections in Turkey: Between Securitisation and Desecuritisation.” Parliamentary Affairs 62 (1): 129–48. Randall, V. 2007. “Political Parties and Democratic Developmental States.” Development Policy Review 25 (5): 633–52. Saeed, S. 2016. Kurdish Politics in Turkey: From the PKK to the KCK. New York: Routledge. Sakallio˘glu, Ü. C. 1996. “Parameters and Strategies of Islam–State Interaction in Republican Turkey.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 28 (2): 231–51. Sarigil, Z., and E. Karakoc. 2017. “Inter-Ethnic (In)tolerance Between Turks and Kurds: Implications for Turkish Democratisation.” South European Society and Politics 22 (2): 197–216.

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Saylan, I. 2012. “The Europeanization Process and Kurdish Nationalism in Turkey: The Case of the Democratic Society Party.” Nationalities Papers 40 (2): 185–202. Share, D. 1999. “From Policy-Seeking to Office-Seeking: The Metamorphosis of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party.” In Policy, Office, or Votes?: How Political Parties in Western Europe Make Hard Decisions, edited by W. C. Müller, K. Strøm, R. H. Bates, and P. Lange, 89–111. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Somer, M. 2007. “Moderate Islam and Secularist Opposition in Turkey: Implications for the World, Muslims and Secular Democracy.” Third World Quarterly 28 (7): 1271–89. Strøm, K. 1990. “A Behavioral Theory of Competitive Political Parties.” American Journal of Political Science 34 (2): 565–98. Tepe, S., and A. Alemdaro˘glu. 2021. “How Authoritarians Win When They Lose.” Journal of Democracy 32 (4): 87–101. Tezcür, G. M. 2015. “Violence and Nationalist Mobilization: The Onset of the Kurdish Insurgency in Turkey.” Nationalities Papers 43 (2): 248–66. Watts, N. F. 1999. “Allies and Enemies: Pro-Kurdish Parties in Turkish Politics, 1990–94.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 31 (4): 631–56. Watts, N. F. 2006. “Activists in Office: Pro-Kurdish Contentious Politics in Turkey.” Ethnopolitics 5 (2): 125–44. Wickham, C. R. 2004. “The Path to Moderation: Strategy and Learning in the Formation of Egypt’s Wasat Party.” Comparative Politics 32: 205–28. Yadirgi, V. 2017. The Political Economy of the Kurds of Turkey: The Political Economy of the Kurds of Turkey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yavuz, M. H. 1997. “Political Islam and the Welfare (Refah) Party in Turkey. ” Comparative Politics 60 (1): 63–82.

CHAPTER 3

A Discursive Opportunity Structure to Confront the State

Chapter 2 illustrated the sources of legitimacy for the transformation of pro-Kurdish and Islamist parties within the post-1980 political order of Turkey. It showed that the Turkish-Islam Synthesis in the 1980s provided the symbolic, cultural and material sources for the transformation of the Islamist RP into the AKP while the Kurdish opening (KO) throughout the decade of 2000s set similar opportunities for the organizational and programmatic maturation of the pro-Kurdish parties. On the other side, the global neoliberal context, the 2001 economic crisis and the inability of the previous governments to cope with the political tensions between a secular military-bureaucratic state and the Turkish Islamists produced a desire for new, competent-looking political leaders that would emphasize effective governance over ideological concerns. This led to the emergence of a successor-Islamist party, the AKP with an office-seeking strategy. The Kurdish-led HDP, in contrast, emerged combining the features of the mixture of an office-seeking and policy-seeking party in 2012: The eastern wing of the party, the DBP, was more office-oriented in the Kurdish political region of Turkey while the party’s representation at the national level was more policy-oriented under the umbrella of the HDP. With this background in mind, the following chapter (Chapter 4) will illustrate how the two parties succeeded in framing the repressive acts of the state as an issue of democracy and how they were able to become the owners of this issue,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Ayan Musil, The Transformation of Kurdish and Islamist Parties in Turkey, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06293-3_3

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attracting a variety of social groups. For the AKP, this happened particularly during the elections of 2002 and 2007 (and continued partially also during the 2010 constitutional referendum) while for the HDP, this happened during June 2015 parliamentary elections. The aim of this chapter is to fill a missing link between the previous chapter and the next chapter, which will empirically show the successful nature of the frames used by these parties in referring to the political acts of the state as an ‘issue of democracy.’ The puzzle that this chapter aims to address is: How is it possible for these parties to frame the state elite as despotic, such as ‘those who fire a bullet against democracy’1 or ‘those who try to oppress us’2 in a public setting where the state has relatively all the power to shut these parties down like it did earlier? What kinds of opportunity structures enable these parties deliver such public statements without any fear and attract different constituencies without leading to any successful state intervention? As discussed in Chapter 1, the role of the Turkish state in dissolving the ethnic and religious parties or criminalizing their party officials affected their transformation as they had to develop their own response mechanisms to cope with this challenge. As Özbudun (2010) states, most of the rulings on dissolving Islamist parties were based on their alleged violation of the constitutional provisions protecting the secular character of the state, and the rulings on dissolving pro-Kurdish parties were based on their alleged violation of the provisions protecting the indivisible national and territorial integrity of the state. As a result of experiencing very high number of party closures (compared with other European countries), Turkey has long been categorized as a ‘militant democracy’ (Bourne and Bértoa 2017; Casal Bértoa and Bourne 2017). Yet, the militant character of this democracy was much more emphasized than the fact that it was also democratic within the scholarship of Turkish party politics (Ba¸skan and Güney 2012; Özbudun 2010; Kogacioglu 2003; Moral and Tokdemir 2017; Ayan Musil and Vašenda 2020). Put the militant nature of party dissolutions aside, these parties found several opportunities to form and reform their successors as a result of the political openings that the regime provided. They continued to participate in elections under different labels even though the state had the advantage to institutionally and discursively marginalize them when it deemed necessary. When talking about the effect of state repression over the transformation of Islamist and pro-Kurdish parties, there is hence one scope condition that must be taken into account. While a scope condition is

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defined as a condition that restricts the scope of a theoretical argument and its generalizability, it is often used to build more powerful arguments (Walker and Cohen 1985; Harris 1997, 126). Within the theoretical framework of this book, the scope condition is a discursive opportunity structure that empowers these parties to publicly confront the repressive acts of the state, using the frame of ‘violation of democracy.’ It is the existence of such discursive opportunity structures, that turned the elections in 2002, 2007 and June 2015 into opportunities for democratization in Turkey. This chapter presents the Europeanization context of Turkey in the 2000s and the post-Gezi context in 2013 as the two discursive opportunity structures that empowered the Islamist and pro-Kurdish parties (respectively) to publicly confront a repressive state. Thanks to these discursive opportunity structures, these parties were able to take bold positions against the existing power structure within the state institutions. A political opportunity structure, found in the original studies on social movements with an aim to understand their mobilizational capacity (McAdam 1999; Tarrow 1994; Kriesi et al. 1995) means that mobilization depends on the opportunities and constraints offered by the political-institutional setting. A discursive opportunity structure (DOS), on the other hand, is a term coined by Koopmans and Olzak (2004) and is a structure that provides an opportunity for certain political frames to be effective in mobilizing collective action: These frames can either stem from discourses that are long-lived and deeply embedded in the surrounding culture or from relatively short-lived and relatively new ideational elements that can still be highly salient or deemed important as new emerging societal concerns (McCammon et al. 2007, 732). The agents (political leaders or social movement activists) need discursive opportunities to provide visibility to their frames, which is a necessary condition for a message to be diffused in public sphere and influence the public discourse (Koopmans and Olzak 2004, 203). In the next two sections, first I argue that Turkey’s Europeanization Context during the AKP’s first and second term in office, provided a DOS that empowered the AKP to confront the military-bureaucratic state, which was deeply criticized in domestic and Western media outlets. Second, I show that the post-Gezi context between 2013 and 2015 provided a DOS for opposition parties whereby the public criticisms against the AKP government’s authoritarian-leaning rhetoric and policies became more visible and legitimate. Within the framework of this DOS, the HDP was able to

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confront the emerging authoritarianism in Turkey under the AKP rule. In short, these broader discursive contexts (Europeanization and post-Gezi context) emboldened the AKP and the HDP respectively to articulate a confrontational discourse using the frame of ‘democratic struggle’ against a repressive state.

Turkey’s Europeanization Context as a Discursive Opportunity Structure for the AKP 3.1

While Turkey had attained candidacy status in December 1999 for European Union (EU) membership, it initiated a formal accession negotiation with the EU during the AKP’s first term in office, in October 2005. In this period, Turkey went through a process of Europeanization, which, according to Diez et al. (2005), could be observed in four different categories: policy-Europeanization, political Europeanization, societal Europeanization and discursive Europeanization. The first one adheres to the impact of the EU on the policy-making process, including a change in policy actors, policy problems, instruments, resources and styles. An example was Turkey’s shift toward more liberal rules of the European single market and the growing visibility of private economic actors in the country. Political-Europeanization adheres to the impact that the EU makes on domestic political processes and institutional structures such as national executives and parliaments. In Turkey, changing structure of the National Security Council (NSC) in 2003 was a prominent example for the political Europeanization since it greatly impacted the Turkish civil-military relations. The NSC was an institution being criticized for preventing the consolidation of democracy in Turkey due to a lack of effective democratic control over it. The institution was seen as a source of the military’s autonomy in politics. In 2003, not only the military representation in the institution was curtailed but its decisions also became advisory. Earlier its decisions had to be given priority consideration by the Council of Ministers (Güney 2015, 110–11). Another example for the political Europeanization of Turkey was the increasing influence of non-governmental civil society organizations, business associations and economic interest groups in shaping Turkish foreign policy (Oguzlu 2010, 666). In domestic processes, the level of civic engagement within the society increased and the reforms gradually empowered

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civil society groups who were able to work without being pressured by repressive laws and bureaucratic procedures (Tocci 2005). Societal Europeanization refers to the impact of the EU on constructing new social identities and altering the ways in which such identities are represented. Either through the dissemination of EU norms or the new meanings that citizens attach to the EU, Europeanization is reflected in the gradual change in, for instance, citizens’ desire becoming European and with lesser attachments to national identities. On this point, the Turkish society did not really show strong signs of identity change: Even though the Turks were more or less supportive of the EU reforms, this support rather came as a response to the EU conditionality. The reforms passed in parliament with outbursts of Turkish nationalism and lack of mass support for provisions like minority rights and Kurdish language (Kubicek 2005, 372–73). Finally, discursive Europeanization means to what extent the political actors make discursive references to the European level rather than the national context in justifying their policy decisions or political strategies. Indeed, it has been emphasized that the discourse of Turkey’s accession to the EU in the 2000s often justified the civil society’s own existence and activism toward democratization (Rumelili 2005; D. N. Göksel and Güne¸s 2005). The reforms in all four spheres indeed constituted a great advantage for the AKP government to confront a state that perceived its Islamist background a threat against the secular political order. Thanks to a process of Europeanization in different spheres, the domestic and international civil society groups were more critical of Turkey’s military-bureaucratic state establishment. The destructive role of past military interventions and party dissolutions on Turkish democracy and the notion that political parties should be the main actors linking society to the state were often coming to the agenda in public debates. In mainstream newspapers such as Hurriyet or Milliyet , as well as left-wing outlets like Radikal, there were liberal intellectuals that voiced several criticisms against the nonneutral position of a military-bureaucratic state in affecting political life either through coup attempts or Constitutional Court decisions on party dissolutions. For instance, on the court’s decision to dissolve the FP on 11 June 2001, Hasan Cemal, one of the leading journalists of his time in Milliyet stated that:

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So far, the Constitutional Court closed down four political parties, the last of which is the FP, on the grounds that they aimed to introduce S’haria order… The logic goes that ‘these parties are the enemy of democracy. When they are on political stage, they hide themselves. They cover their real intentions with a shawl. In other words, they engage in deception (takkiye). When the time comes, they wave their fist, encroach the government and give an end to the secular order. It is the best to take action and dissolve these parties before they gain strength this much.’ However, there is alternative to this logic: Why not only punish the person who commits the crime, advocates or encourages violence in the party? In this way, you find a way to tame and integrate the party into the political system. This is the right approach. But it is not credited here, in so much that advocating headscarf in the parliamentary arena can justify the decision to dissolve a party, as was the case with the FP… Restricting the space of freedom this much does not conform with democracy. You put your signature on the European Convention on Human Rights as a state and then you encounter these examples. You cannot do both. We need to debate the space given to freedoms and politics in a civilized framework and reach a consensus as soon as possible.3

Throughout the AKP incumbency in the decade of 2000s, opinions like above started appearing many more times in the media. As Taskin (2013, 301) argues, the sudden entrance of the Taraf newspaper to the media life in 2007 created significant advantages (along with internal tensions) for the conservatives since Taraf dared to challenge the secularist establishment with a sharp language that the conservatives were not able to use earlier. The newspaper, Zaman, on the other side, emerged as part of a media group representing the interests of the Gülen community. It worked to create a discourse to legitimize the Anatolian businessmen’s economic activities as opposed to the Istanbul-centered business groups ˙ represented by the TÜSIAD, which was claimed to be an ally of the state. The columnists and editors of these newspapers along with several liberal intellectuals like Hasan Cemal publishing in mainstream newspapers, hence, acted as the ‘gatekeepers’ of a public discourse critical of a military-bureaucratic establishment. Gatekeepers are important actors that help building a discursive opportunity structure. As Koopmans and Olzak (2004, 203) argue, gatekeepers ‘have the ability to select, shape, amplify, or diminish public messages. The selectivity of coverage and the mechanisms of allocating prominence to covered messages are quite well known

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for the traditional mass media and include decisions about the size and placement of articles or about the amount and primacy of airing time.’ Meanwhile, in the decade between 2000 and 2010, the AKP was a much more integrated actor into the Western or particularly to the European political society. As Öni¸s (2007) defines it, the AKP leadership acted as a ‘conservative globalist,’ in the sense that it was conservative, right-ofcenter with explicit Islamist roots but at the same time was committed to European integration and reform much more pronounced than any of its predecessors or existing competitors. The AKP leadership between 2002 and 2004 were proudly voicing their collaboration with Western institutions, working hard to find an internationally acceptable solution to the Cyprus conflict, which resulted in the EU’s decision of December 2004 to start accession negotiations at a date much earlier than anticipated (Öni¸s 2007, 252). During the interviews conducted with AKP activists in the year 2007, the relationship between the AKP government and the EU institutions was positively evaluated whereas the other political parties in parliament and the radical groups in the EU essentializing Turkey’s Muslim identity were blamed for creating obstacles in Turkey’s process of EU integration. As R18 stated, The AKP implements more democratic policies compared to other political parties. We work for the AKP because we appreciate what it has done so far and believe that its trajectory is promising. The public debates here are about the headscarf while in Europe, some perceive Turkey as an Islamic country. In Europe, I observe people from different classes and different viewpoints. The ones who wear or do not wear headscarf can live together. I would like Turkey to follow a similar democratic path. Our prime minister Erdo˘gan and the current president Gül has such targets as they make visits to Europe. In the last five years, the government’s economic investments have grown, and industrialization has accelerated. I believe Turkey has a vision now. It is well recognized by the US and the EU. I have no hesitations that Turkey will be a member of the European Union.

The AKP’s economic performance and commitment to EU membership justified the criticisms against an interventionist state bureaucracy. According to R21, The state’s approach to our party was negative and incommensurate from the beginning. This has to change and I do believe it will change. I am hopeful for the future of Turkey. The AKP has a great team of leaders. The ministers know their job. They have a vision.

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In the words of R28, ‘what really represents the AKP today is its progressive policies in pursuit of the EU membership.’ Among the interviews conducted with former AKP parliamentarians in the year 2018, there was also a consensus that the AKP leadership, including Recep Tayyip Erdo˘gan, focused particularly on Turkey’s membership to the EU. As R7 stated, I experienced the whole process as the co-chair of the EU-Turkey joint parliamentary commission. I took part in the negotiations. The reason for our passion on EU membership was the EU’s main principles or the Maastricht treaty. These principles were human rights, rule of law and economic prosperity. Embracing these principles was going to bring a tremendous advantage for our country.

Similarly, R8 stated, I think our party put a sincere effort to be an EU member in those years.” However, both respondents R7 and R8 accused the EU of the subsequent fatigue in EU-Turkey relations. In the words of R7, “no other country than Turkey went through such a biased process;” and in the words of R8, “the EU was not sincere in its promises to take Turkey as a member from the beginning.

On the other side, a former high-ranking AKP official, R6, made a confession regarding the AKP’s strategic use of the EU accession process in order to challenge the military-bureaucratic establishment in Turkey: Initially, Mr. Tayyip [Tayyip Bey] was making binding statements about Turkey’s membership to the EU. As a matter of fact, he even stated that a membership status in the Socialist International would be beneficial for the AKP. These were yet pragmatic ideals just like the pragmatic goal of becoming a member of the EU. If Turkey were a member of the EU, it would not experience coups or military interventions.

These statements show the intensity of relations between the AKP government and the EU and how the Europeanization context brought was bringing a discursive opportunity structure for the AKP to promote its self-image as an advocate of democracy and liberal values, while hauling the state establishment down to a major veto player against Turkey’s process of integrating into the EU.

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3.2 The Gezi Context as a Discursive Opportunity Structure for the HDP In June 2015 national elections, the HDP received support not only from the Kurdish political region in the southeast of Turkey, but also from a substantial Turkish population in different parts of the country. In this election, the Kurdish-led party overtook the performance of its predecessors and reached a record-high vote share, 13 percent, almost twice as high as the vote share (6.6 percent) in the previous national election. It had campaigned on peace and democracy. One of the interview respondents, E5, having served as a long-term activist in pro-Kurdish parties defined the HDP in the following way: The HDP does not really have an ideology but is an organization that adapted to the political circumstances. What really makes the HDP different from previous Kurdish parties is that it is a combination of diverse political movements, not just the Kurdish movement. The idea is that different cultures can live together. It is not primarily a Kurdish party but one provoked by the state. We want peace, democracy, freedom, fraternity. It’s a party targeting a society where a diverse population lives.

The above statement describes the HDP’s distinction from its predecessors with an emphasis on ‘diversity’ in the own words of a party activist. But the transformation of the ethnonationalist pro-Kurdish party into such a diverse, all-encompassing Kurdish-led party did not happen all of a sudden. The election result in June 2015 was the product of a gradual change. Another respondent, E2, states that it started with the capture and imprisonment of the PKK leader in 1999, Abdullah Öcalan. His imprisonment created an important rupture for the Kurdish national movement, triggering a process of ideological change: The ideology started shifting after Öcalan’s capture. Öcalan is the ideologue of the party. He saw that the Kurdish question could not be resolved only through armed struggle. He started talking about the democratization of Turkey.

The change in Öcalan’s ideas during his imprisonment coincided with a shift in Turkish state’s Kurdish policies, which helped with the desecuritization of the Kurdish identity in the decade of 2000s, as discussed in

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Chapter 2. A policy of recognition and engagement replaced the securitization and suppression, thanks to the Europeanization process of Turkey, which brought more public visibility and acceptance to the pro-Kurdish parties, despite the ongoing conundrum about their affiliation with the Kurdish rebel group, the PKK. The activists within the party continued to embrace the struggle for Kurdish rights as the main principle of their party while the leftist activists in the party were critical of their party not being able to sufficiently reach out to the non-Kurdish left-wing groups in the country. E5 from 2018 states that: It was not that the Kurdish parties never had support before. The elections had always been unfair and unfavorable for these parties. Since 2013, the HDP finally started receiving the approval of a larger segment of the society, and, as a result, it reached 13 percent of the votes in 2015 national elections.

It is, yet, important to underline that this interviewee refers to the year, 2013, as a benchmark for the major societal approval that a Kurdishsuccessor party has ever received in Turkey. There are two important events that particularly make the year 2013 of strategic importance for the rising approval rate for the HDP. It is the year, in the middle of which the nationwide Gezi uprising broke out and challenged the dominance of the AKP in the political system. The Gezi uprising emerged as a local protest campaign against the demolition of Taksim Gezi Park ˙ in Istanbul, which was supposed to be renovated into a shopping mall. As the peaceful protests were ruthlessly suppressed by the police force, new protests emerged in various other cities. Ultimately, in a two-monthlong period, the protests spread to almost every city of Turkey and about three million people took to the streets protesting against the AKP government. Erdo˘gan blatantly admitted that he gave the order to the police forces to suppress the demonstrations by any necessary means4 and consistently created a polarizing impact between the Gezi supporters and pro-government groups via condemning the protesters as ‘drunkards, looters and terrorists led by foreign and domestic dark forces.’5 Overall, Gezi is considered as one of the largest popular uprisings in the 90-year-old republican history of Turkey (Özen 2015), which helped to discursively construct a collective oppositional identity against a ‘repressive and authoritarian government,’ hence acted as the antagonistic mirror of such a government (Ayan Musil 2014). The antagonistic relationship

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between the Gezi Resistance and the AKP government was mutually constructed at the discursive level in the ways that they portrayed one another (Ayan Musil 2014, 335). This discursive construction acted as an opportunity structure for the HDP during the 2015 elections when the party incorporated the key demands of the Gezi resistance on human and environmental rights protection in its political agenda, building a left-ofcenter profile (Grigoriadis 2016), and including the brother of one of the victims of the Gezi protests in the party’s list of MP candidates to symbolize the party’s connection with Gezi (Göksel and Tekdemir 2018, 389). In addition to the Gezi protests, the year 2013 marks the official start of the peace talks between the PKK and the Turkish state. The PKK duly declared a ceasefire on 23rd of March in the same year. As Baser and Ozerdem (2021, 1783) aptly describe: ˙ On January 3 2013, two Kurdish MPs went to Imralı Island to visit Öcalan, ˙ which officially started the peace talks, namely the Imralı Meetings. Other Kurdish MPs visited throughout February and April. After those meetings, BDP officials then visited the leadership of the PKK and KCK. That same year, the Turkish state officially admitted that negotiations were underway.

The Gezi uprisings hence broke out during an ongoing peace process, which created a complex dynamic, which is fundamental to understand the discursive opportunity structure that the HDP used to appeal to the larger society in the 2015 June election. The interview evidence (especially from the year 2018) is helpful to shed light on the puzzle. The intensive analysis of the responses given by the interviewees on these two ˙ processes (the Imralı talks and the post-Gezi politics between 2013 and ˙ 2015) highlight the following points: First, the Imralı talks was a followup to the desecuritized environment for Kurdish identity and reinforced the visibility of the HDP in Turkish society. Second, despite this positive impact, the pro-Kurdish party activists were from the beginning skeptical about the nature of the peace talks and had strong anxieties on the government’s handling of the process. Baser and Ozerdem (2021) also underline how the Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK) trials; the assassination of three Kurdish activist women in Paris in 2013, the continuation of the Turkish state in building military posts in southeastern Turkey and increasing the number of village guards. When the leader of the autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan, Masoud Barzani met with Erdogan

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in Diyarbakir on 16 November 2013, the BDP leadership made critical remarks on both Barzani’s and the AKP’s ‘real intentions’ for this meeting. Selahattin Demirtas, who was back then the co-chair of the BDP stated that: ‘We hope that Mr. Barzani pays attention to the domestic politics of Turkey and the Kurdish struggle within Turkey, without being an instrument of cheap politics.’6 Pervin Buldan, who was back then an MP representing Igdir province, criticized the exclusion of Kurdish activists and the lack of reference to Abdullah Öcalan in the meeting with following words, ‘Mr. Prime Minister [Erdo˘gan] and Mr. Barzani praised one another about the ongoing peace talks in Turkey but no one mentioned the name of the leading actor of this process, and that is Mr. Öcalan.’7 Gültan Kı¸sanak, who was back then the co-chair of the newly founded HDP (to which the BDP was later going to join), criticized Erdogan and Barzani for being silent on the killing of three Kurdish citizens in Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan) by the Turkish armed forces.8 The skepticism and anxiety over the peace talks gave the party elite, and most notably the co-leader of the HDP, Selahattin Demirtas, the courage to publicly challenge the government’s authoritarian-leaning policies in a post-Gezi context. Gezi was a turning point in terms of signifying the AKP’s authoritarian tendency in government. It was the post-Gezi context, in which the criticisms over the AKP as a polarizing, authoritarian actor became much more systematic both among Turkey’s opposition and the western media. As Göksel and Tekdemir (2018, 378–79) in their seminal article also argue, ‘the Gezi experience resulted in some Turkish citizens—particularly secularists—becoming much more critical of state policies related to security, enabling them to empathize with the Kurdish movement.’ Hence, the post-Gezi context provided a discursive opportunity structure for the HDP to confront the suppressive acts of the AKP government against the opponents and civilians. This public confrontation was possible despite an ongoing peace process between the PKK and the state (now controlled by the AKP) because the Kurdish activists were already highly concerned about the real intentions of the AKP government and the potential success of the peace talks. Let’s turn now the attention to the interview evidence that supports the above-mentioned argumentation. According to E13: The internal change that was already happening within the Kurdish movement was pushing the movement toward others [i.e. non-Kurdish groups]. When the Peace Process started, the Kurdish movement could

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then communicate with other communities who were not open to such dialogues before. Before the Peace Process, the Turkish state had destroyed the Kurdish parties, equating them with the PKK. However, throughout the peace process, the HDP faced a more open political environment.

This interviewee (E13) continues to stress the positive impact of the peace process on the Kurdish movement: Of course, our struggle has been ongoing for 40 years: women, Kurds, revolutionaries. But a large part of this change happened with the Peace Process. Guns were put down, and a different image of Öcalan was given by the state. While before he was portrayed as a murderer and criminal, they shifted their narrative of him to a man who proposes solutions to each problem in Turkey.

From the perspective of this interviewee, the peace process can then be seen as the continuation of the Kurdish opening that was launched in 2009, in terms of publicly legitimizing the demands of the Kurdish rights. On the other side, several other interviewees stress the problematic sides of the Peace Process and discuss the Kurdish movement’s lack of trust in the ‘sincerity’ of the AKP government in its commitment to provide peace. From the perspective of E15: The peace process was from the beginning problematic. For example, the state established military posts (kalekollar) in places where the PKK was supposed to retreat. Even though they were officially ‘taking steps’ for peace, they did not give the operations. For sure, those times were also difficult for the AKP since its power was challenged by the Gezi protests.

E16, an activist representing the women wings of the Kurdish movement within the HDP also stated that: There were councils called the KOMs, composed of both Turkish and Kurdish women. These councils were specific to the peace process. These councils were debating different dimensions of the peace process and providing recommendations. For instance, one main issue they addressed was that the war had created tremendous levels of poverty in the country. They recommended prioritizing a solution to the problem of poverty in the post-war context. But the KOMs stopped being functional at certain moments, especially after the state established new military posts during the PKK’s retreat. This was a sign that something was not right.

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Furthermore, according to E12, the two main signals for the collapse of the peace process was the insistence of the AKP government to introduce a presidential system within the Turkish political system, and ˙ Güvenlik Yasası) that passed in parliaan internal security package (Iç ment, just three months before the June 2015 national elections. The internal security package was authorizing the police and local governors to conduct arbitrary searches and arrests of individuals participating in public protests. During the official peace talks, it is true that the Kurds, for the first time, were officially addressed by the state. The main opposition parties, the CHP and the MHP, were less effective in this period. The Kurdish position stressed the importance of the empowerment of local governments and the self-determination rights of the local people. Thanks to the de-escalation of the conflict, it was possible to build Rojava (the de facto autonomous Kurdish region in northern Syria). However, later on, the Turkish parliament passed an internal security package and the AKP continued to stress the importance of a centralized presidential system, which made it clear that the peace process was going to fail. The political developments in the Middle East, the Kobani events and the AKP’s foreign policy toward Syria further raised skepticisms among the Kurdish activists on the peace process. When, in September 2014, the Islamic State (ISIS) launched a siege on Kobani, which was one of the three de facto autonomous cantons in Northern Syria under the Syrian Kurdish political party, Democratic Union Party (PYD—Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat ), it had a deep emotional impact on the supporters of the HDP in Turkey. The AKP government was reluctant to take immediate direct actions to help the PYD, viewing it as an extension of the PKK while on the other side the HDP made urgent call for demonstrations in solidarity with Kobani (Gerim 2020, 2). These events all indicate that there was a deep-rooted mistrust between the government and the HDP throughout the whole process of peace negotiations. According to E6, ‘it is fundamental to establish mutual trust in a peace process, just like two lovers, at loggerheads, trying to reunite again. It is a painful process. When one side makes a mistake, the other side should not be ready to terminate the whole process. This is what a trust relationship requires.’ The peace process officially continued until the June 2015 elections and did not set a barrier for the HDP to confront the authoritarianleaning AKP government due to the aforementioned problematic and questionable aspects, stated by the Kurdish activists. With the skepticism

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over the peace talks in the background, the post-Gezi period in 2014 and early 2015 was providing a perfect discursive opportunity structure for the HDP to publicly confront the AKP government in opposition media outlets. Compared to the Europeanization context, which enabled the AKP to challenge the military-bureaucratic state for more than a decade until it seized control over the state institutions, the post-Gezi period was relatively short. Yet, as explained earlier, the frames used in a discursive opportunity structure can be relatively new if they are becoming salient or addressing new emerging concerns. Many students of Turkish politics take the Gezi protests as the starting point for the rapid autocratization of the Turkish regime due to the government’s disproportional use of power over the protesters and intensification of crackdowns on oppositional groups that turned more systematic from this point on (Castaldo 2018, 480; Esen and Gumuscu 2021, 4; Sözen 2020). However, even though the Turkish regime was in a process of gradual autocratization as of 2013, it was still a semi-democratic regime or party free according to Freedom House (2016), providing a discursive opportunity structure for the HDP to challenge the autocratic policies of the AKP government. The agents need a semi-democratic, rather than a fully repressive environment to frame certain political developments in a publicly appealing way and give visibility to these frames. It should yet be acknowledged that the HDP could not take advantage of the opportunity structure created by the Gezi protests immediately. The confrontational strategy against the AKP government took time since the Gezi protests. The protests unfolded while the HDP was acting as the middleman between the two sides during peace negotiations. On the second day of the protests, the BDP co-chair, Selahattin Demirta¸s made the following public statement on Gezi: In principle, we support the people’s resistance. But we also need to be careful. Those living in Istanbul taste the flavor the teargas for the first time. But we were teargassed for decades in Diyarbakır, Hakkari and Sırnak. ¸ The smell of the gas persists in the streets of Diyarbakır even after one year. We do not want to let the nationalist and Kemalist groups undermine the peace negotiation process, so we need to be careful. We think the resistance against the AKP’s oppression in Taksim and all over Turkey is legitimate and justified. But we do not want to allow the Gezi Park protests turn into an opposition against peace negotiations. We do not participate in the same activities as fascists and racists do.9

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Similar to Demirta¸s’s public statements on Gezi, one of the interviewees, E15, affirmed that: During the Gezi protests, the party could not take immediate steps to join the movement. How easily can we join anti-government protests while trying to pursue the peace talks with the government? Only after a certain period of time, the left-wing groups started joining forces with the Kurds.

Indeed, when the Gezi protests emerged at the end of May 2013, the HDP did not adopt a particular attitude toward the AKP government. Some BDP deputies, such as Sırrı Süreyya Önder, took individual initiatives to join the protests, without any guidance or direction given by the party leadership.10 The interviewee, E3, further states that: We were at Gezi, but not as a political party. Our party was not the representative of the movement back then, but I was personally there. Sırrı Sureyya was there. Gezi was a protest that started in the streets. First time in my life, I joined a protest where I marched and yelled together with the Kemalists against the AKP.

E10 seconds this view: During the Gezi protests, we were in the streets not as a political party, but as individuals. In a way, we had to haul the Kurdish flag down even though we did display it on the first day. Had we not lowered the Kurdish flag, Turks would not join the protests.

On the other hand, the encounters of individual Kurdish activists with other protesters helped the HDP to realize that the synergy created during the Gezi resistance was a perfect occasion to appeal to other social groups, in other words, to reach their goal of Turkey-ization (Türkiyeli¸sle¸smek) or becoming a party of entire Turkey, not only of Kurds. E13 states that: There was a lot of sympathy for the Kurds among the Gezi protestors and we saw that the people started thinking, ‘the Kurds have probably been suffering for long periods, just like we suffer now.’ It was Gezi that started giving this new perspective to people.

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It was mainly the former apolitical segments of the society, such as professionals, students and youth groups having joined the protests, that were gaining this perspective, as Özen (2015) notes. Özen (2015, 548), in analyzing the political outcomes of the Gezi uprising for Turkey in the upcoming years, further emphasizes that, during the protests, these [apolitical] groups ‘learned to express their concerns, demands, and objections against the power,’ and ‘a spontaneous solidarity among various different groups made the protesters more sensitive to others’ demands and interests.’ This societal change was reflected in the frames that protesters were constructing in their antagonistic relationship with the state forces and the public spaces that they occupied to contest the contestation against the dominating discourses of the majoritarian government with neoconservative tendencies (Ta¸s 2017; David and Toktamı¸s 2015; Inceoglu 2015). As the mainstream media was biased against the protests and chose not to expose the frames used by the protesters to the larger public, it was this time the protesters using social media engines such as Twitter or Facebook that acted as the gatekeepers for selecting, shaping or amplifying the public messages. Indeed, as research has shown, Twitter was variably imagined as ‘the extended public space for protest expression—the ‘digital public square’ as assuming the role of mainstream broadcast news media, and as the protestors’ ally and a symbol of freedom of expression (Jenzen et al. 2021, 433). Since the Gezi moment itself enabled a plurality of individuals and social groups to form counter-hegemonic forces against the government in public space,11 it brought the common desire for democracy and the freedoms to the agenda of the opposition parties. More specifically, it acted as a discursive opportunity structure for the HDP leadership to confront the oppressive policies of the AKP in the upcoming 2015 national election.

Notes 1. This is the public statement of Recep Tayyip Erdogan when he confronted the annulment decision of the Constitutional Court regarding the parliamentary voting on presidential elections. See the front page of Milliyet, ‘En Sert Polemik’ on 7 May 2007. 2. This is the public statement of the HDP leader Selahattin Demirtas against the president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on 22 March 2015. His statement also included a ‘dictator’ label for Erdogan. See ‘Demirta¸s: Bu Newroz kimin barı¸s istedi˘gini, kimin diktatörlü˘ge sarıldı˘gını kanıtlamı¸stır.’

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3. 4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

T24, https://t24.com.tr/haber/demirtas-bu-newroz-kimin-baris-kimindiktatorluk-istedigini-kanitlamistir,291207, accessed 26 August 2021. Hasan Cemal, “Demokrasi ve Özgürlük Alanını Geni¸sletmek” Milliyet, p. 21, 21 July 2001. “Prime Minister Erdo˘gan blesses Turkish police for ‘heroic’ action during Gezi unrest” Hürriyet Daily News, 24 June 2013, https://www.hurriyetd ailynews.com/prime-minister-erdogan-blesses-turkish-police-for-heroicaction-during-gezi-unrest-49356. Halil Gürhanlı, “Turkey’s local elections, Erdo˘gan and the spectre of Gezi” openDemocracy, 26 March 2014, https://www.opendemocracy. net/en/north-africa-west-asia/turkeys-local-elections-erdog-and-spectreof-gezi/. “Erdo˘gan-Barzani Görü¸smesine BDP ve HDP’den Tepkiler” Bianet, 18 November 2013. https://m.bianet.org/kurdi/siyaset/151382-erdoganbarzani-gorusmesine-bdp-ve-hdp-den-tepkiler. Ibid. Ibid. “Demirta¸s’tan Gezi Yorumu” CNNTürk, 1 June 2013. https://www. cnnturk.com/2013/turkiye/06/01/demirtastan.gezi.yorumu/710325. 0/index.html. The BDP deputy, Sırrı Süreyya Önder was holding a sit-in protest together with a crowd on the very first day of the Gezi protests when the police attacked and dispersed the crowd with tear gas and water cannons. Önder was shot by police in the shoulder with a tear gas canister. See “Deputy Önder injured after being hit by canister in Gezi Park protests” Hürriyet Daily News, 31 May 2013. https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/deputyonder-injured-after-being-hit-by-canister-in-gezi-park-protests--47954. See Bilgiç (2018, 267–70) for a detailed review of this literature.

References Ayan Musil, Pelin. 2014. “Does Antagonism Precede Agonism in Challenging Neoliberalism? The Gezi Resistance in Turkey.” Acta Politologica 6 (3): 326– 42. Ayan Musil, Pelin, and Jan Vašenda. 2020. “Party Regulation in Turkey: A Comparison with Modern Europe.” Turkish Studies 21 (1): 83–107. Baser, Bahar, and Alpaslan Ozerdem. 2021. “Conflict Transformation and Asymmetric Conflicts: A Critique of the Failed Turkish-Kurdish Peace Process.” Terrorism and Political Violence 33 (8): 1775–96. Ba¸skan, Filiz, and Aylin Güney. 2012. “Election Report and Political Analysis: Turkey’s June 2011 Parliamentary Elections.” Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 14 (1): 165–74.

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Bilgiç, Ali. 2018. “Reclaiming the National Will: Resilience of Turkish Authoritarian Neoliberalism after Gezi.” South European Society and Politics 23 (2): 259–80. Bourne, Angela K., and Fernando Casal Bértoa. 2017. “Mapping ‘Militant Democracy’: Variation in Party Ban Practices in European Democracies (1945–2015).” European Constitutional Law Review 13 (2): 221–47. Casal BÉrtoa, Fernando, and Angela Bourne. 2017. “Prescribing Democracy? Party Proscription and Party System Stability in Germany, Spain and Turkey.” European Journal of Political Research 56 (2): 440–65. Castaldo, Antonino. 2018. “Populism and Competitive Authoritarianism in Turkey.” Journal of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 18 (4): 467–87. David, Isabel, and Kumru F. Toktamı¸s. 2015. Everywhere Taksim: Sowing the Seeds for a New Turkey at Gezi. Everywhere Taksim: Sowing the Seeds for a New Turkey at Gezi. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Diez, Thomas, Apostolos Agnantopoulos, and Alper Kaliber. 2005. “File: Turkey, Europeanization and Civil Society.” South European Society and Politics 10:1 (1): 1–15. Esen, Berk, and Sebnem Gumuscu. 2021. “Why Did Turkish Democracy Collapse? A Political Economy Account of AKP’s Authoritarianism.” Party Politics 27 (6): 1075–91. Freedom House. 2016. “Turkey.” https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedomworld/2016/turkey. Gerim, Giray. 2020. “The Kobani Events and Contesting Political Discourses on the Kurdish Question in Turkey.” Acta Politologica 12 (1): 1–19. Göksel, Diba Nigar, and Rana Birden Güne¸s. 2005. “The Role of NGOs in the European Integration Process: The Turkish Experience.” South European Society and Politics 10 (1): 57–72. Göksel, O˘guzhan, and Ömer Tekdemir. 2018. “Questioning the ‘Immortal State’: The Gezi Protests and the Short-Lived Human Security Moment in Turkey.” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 45 (3): 376–93. Grigoriadis, Ioannis N. 2016. “The Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) and the 2015 Elections.” Turkish Studies 17 (1): 39–46. Güney, Aylin. 2015. “Europeanization of Civil-Military Relations in Turkey: Civilianization without Democratization?” In The Europeanization of Turkey: Polity and Politics, edited by Ali Tekin and Aylin Güney, 108–23. London: Routledge. Harris, William A. 1997. “On ‘Scope Conditions’ in Sociological Theories.” Social and Economic Studies 46 (4): 123–27. Inceoglu, Irem. 2015. “Encountering Difference and Radical Democratic Trajectory: An Analysis of Gezi Park as Public Space.” City 19 (4): 534–44.

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Jenzen, Olu, Itir Erhart, Hande Eslen-Ziya, Umut Korkut, and Aidan McGarry. 2021. “The Symbol of Social Media in Contemporary Protest: Twitter and the Gezi Park Movement.” Convergence 27 (2): 414–437. Kogacioglu, Dicle. 2003. “Dissolution of Political Parties by the Constitutional Court in Turkey: Judicial Delimitation of the Political Domain.” International Sociology 18 (1): 258–76. Koopmans, Ruud, and Susan Olzak. 2004. “Discursive Opportunities and the Evolution of Right-Wing Violence in Germany.” American Journal of Sociology 110: 198–230. Kriesi, Hanspeter, Ruud Koopmans, Jan Williem Duyvendak, and Marco G. Giugni. 1995. New Social Movements in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kubicek, Paul. 2005. “The European Union and Grassroots Democratization in Turkey.” Turkish Studies 6 (3): 361–77. McAdam, Doug. 1999. Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency 1930–1970. Chicago: Chicago University Press. McCammon, Holly J., Courtney Sanders Muse, Harmony D. Newman, and Teresa M. Terrell. 2007. “Movement Framing and Discursive Opportunity Structures: The Political Successes of the U.S. Women’s Jury Movements.” American Sociological Review 72 (5): 725–49. Moral, Mert, and Efe Tokdemir. 2017. “Justices ‘En Garde’: Ideological Determinants of the Dissolution of Anti-Establishment Parties.” International Political Science Review 38 (3): 264–80. Oguzlu, Tarik. 2010. “Turkey and Europeanization of Foreign Policy?” Political Science Quarterly 125 (4): 657–83. Öni¸s, Ziya. 2007. “Conservative Globalists versus Defensive Nationalists: Political Parties and Paradoxes of Europeanization in Turkey.” Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans 9 (3): 247–61. Özbudun, Ergun. 2010. “Party Prohibition Cases: Different Approaches by the Turkish Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights.” Democratization 17 (1): 125–42. Özen, Hayriye. 2015. “An Unfinished Grassroots Populism: The Gezi Park Protests in Turkey and Their Aftermath.” South European Society and Politics 20 (4): 533–52. Rumelili, Bahar. 2005. “Civil Society and the Europeanization of Greek–Turkish Cooperation.” South European Society and Politics 10 (1): 45–56. Sözen, Yunus. 2020. “Studying Autocratization in Turkey: Political Institutions, Populism, and Neoliberalism.” New Perspectives on Turkey 63: 209– 35. https://doi.org/10.1017/npt.2020.26. Tarrow, Sidney. 1994. Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Ta¸s, Hakkı. 2017. “Street Arts of Resistance in Tahrir and Gezi.” Middle Eastern Studies 53 (5): 802–19. Ta¸skin, Yüksel. 2013. “Hegemonizing Conservative Democracy and the Problems of Democratization in Turkey: Conservatism Without Democrats?” Turkish Studies 14 (2): 292–310. Tocci, Nathalie. 2005. “Europeanization in Turkey: Trigger or Anchor for Reform?” South European Society and Politics 10 (1): 73–83. Walker, Henry A., and Bernard P. Cohen. 1985. “Scope Statements: Imperatives for Evaluating Theory.” American Sociological Review 50 (3): 288–301.

CHAPTER 4

State Repression, Issue-Ownership and the Populist Surge: Comparing the AKP and the HDP

Chapter 1 has introduced the theoretical framework of this book; based on a process-tracing approach connecting the theories of moderation, issue ownership and populism. Chapter 2 has provided the origins of the Kurdish and Islamist parties and discussed the goals of the Kurdishsuccessor HDP and the Islamist-successor AKP upon party formation. Chapter 3 has demonstrated the scope condition for the proposed causal mechanism in the cases of the AKP and the HDP. This chapter provides the empirical evidence for this causal mechanism based on interviews with the party activists, the media statements of the party leaders and the representatives of particular social groups that publicly supported the AKP during the 2002 and 2007 national elections and the HDP during the June 2015 national election. According to the causal mechanism described in the first chapter (see Fig. 1.1), there is a semi-democratic electoral context in which the party is both included in electoral competition but also the subject of the negative incentives sent by a repressive state. Hence, the preferences of the electorate are influenced not only by the ideology of the pro-Kurdish and Islamist parties or by their expectations over economic policies but also by how these parties subject to state repression choose to counter these repressive acts of the state during an electoral competition. The public debates about state repression (which can only be visible in the media during

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Ayan Musil, The Transformation of Kurdish and Islamist Parties in Turkey, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06293-3_4

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certain opportunity structures introduced in Chapter 3) help the party— subject to repression—own the issue of democracy if it chooses to frame this repression as such an issue. For sure, the Islamist-successor party continues to be associated with religion and the Kurdish-successor party continues to be associated with the ethnic rights of the Kurds according to the long-term assessments of the voters. Yet, when these parties establish the ownership of another short-term issue, showing that they are competent to deal with it via confronting a (non-democratic) state that is biased against their presence, they own the ‘issue of democracy’ and receive organized support from a variety of other social groups, transforming the electoral competition into a struggle for democracy. In short, it is the ‘strategic-interaction hypothesis’ based on Islam-state interactions that sets the first block in this causal mechanism (Sakallio˘glu 1996; Heper 1997; Tepe 2012). The repressive state sends negative incentives to the party in the form of a warning that either threatens the party organization as a whole or the party elite. Having received this warning, the party then makes a decision on how to interact with such incentives. The issue ownership theory sets the second block in the causal mechanism in terms of how this decision is made (Petrocik 1996; Budge 2015; Walgrave et al. 2012). The party decides to adopts a confrontational strategy against state repression, repeatedly frames the warning(s) of the state as an ‘issue of democracy’ and owns this issue. Finally, Laclau’s (2005) theory of populism sets the third block: Plurality of unsatisfied demands in the regime turn into a popular totality and support the party that owns the issue of democracy. The first section of this chapter outlines the characteristics of the 2002 elections in which the AKP, as an Islamist-successor party, framed the repressive acts of a military-bureaucratic state as an issue of democracy vis-à-vis its rivals. It will then illustrate how and why certain social groups (liberal intellectuals and the Kurdish nationalists) were convinced with supporting the AKP in 2002. The second section will conduct a similar analysis on the 2007 elections, outlining the major repressive acts of the state against the AKP and the political frames used by the AKP leadership in response to these acts. It will then present the argument that these frames helped the party to sustain the support of the liberals and the ethnic Kurdish group based on the interview evidence. The third section will similarly present the characteristics of the 2015 June elections in which the Kurdish-led HDP framed the exclusivist policies of the AKP government as an issue of democracy. Again, based on interview evidence,

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it will show how the HDP appealed to a variety of social groups outside of the Kurdish constituency, such as the left-wing intellectuals, feminists and environmentalists.

4.1

2002 National Elections and the AKP

The scholars of electoral behavior and party politics extensively debated the electoral success of the AKP in the 2002 national elections. The election took place in extraordinary conditions, most importantly in the context of a massive economic crisis in 2001, which discredited all established parties from the center-left and the center-right and put Turkey in negotiations with the IMF, offering billions of dollars in exchange for economic reforms in the banking sector. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands lost their jobs, the value of lira significantly plunged and prices of imports rose as much as 50 percent. The public debates in the period that starts with 15 April 2001 (the day that triggered the economic crisis) until the national election of 3 November 2002 need attention in terms of the issues that dominated the discourse during the elections. There was certainly disappointment, frustration and resentment against the previous governments and the parties that formed the coalition governments in the 1990s. There was a search for something ‘new’ among the electorate, which was made evident in the media by the journalists and intellectuals. One year before the national election, Mehmet Ali Birand, a popularly known journalist, wrote a column in Milliyet , one of the newspapers that had the highest circulation rate titled, ‘We are frustrated with you all and blame you all.’1 In his column, he was raising harsh criticisms against the leaders of all political parties in opposition and government, stating the complete loss of public trust in them. With regard to the opposition, Birand wrote, ‘while criticizing the government, I am watching with astonishment how they forget their own crimes. This is what the citizens in the street cannot digest… They screwed up the country, yet they still walk around… They are not ashamed. I am sure they will appear in the elections and ask for votes.’ Among the explanations for the success of the AKP, indeed, the worsening economic situation and voters’ perception of the bad performance of previous governments were the prominent ones (Ba¸slevent et al. 2005; Carkoglu 2002; Öni¸s and Keyman 2003; Çarkoglu and Kalaycioglu 2021). Chapter 2 already explained that effective governance; stability and government competence were what was desired by society at large in the

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upcoming years. A party that was untried, promising and had a competent outlook mattered in this election. Table 4.1 shows the performance of the old vs. new parties in this election. It shows that the parties that were not new electorally suffered and lost a significant number of votes Table 4.1 National election in 2002: the performance of old vs. new parties

AKP (new)

ANAP (old)

BBP (old)

CHP (old)

HADEP/DEHAP (old)

DSP (old)

DYP (old)

FP/SP (old)

GP (new)

MHP (old)

YTP (new)

N. of Votes % of Votes N. of MPs N. of Votes % of Votes N. of MPs N. of Votes % of Votes N. of MPs N. of Votes % of Votes N. of MPs N. of Votes % of Votes N. of MPs N. of Votes % of Votes N. of MPs N. of Votes % of Votes N. of MPs N. of Votes % of Votes N. of MPs N. of Votes % of Votes N. of MPs N. of Votes % of Votes N. of MPs N. of Votes % of Votes N. of MPs

1999

2002

Difference

– – – 4,122,929 13.2 86 456,353 1.5 – 2,716,094 8.7 – 1,482,196 4.7 – 6,919,670 22.2 136 3,745,417 12.0 85 4,805,381 15.4 111 – – – 5,606,583 18.4 129 – – –

10,808,229 34.3 363 1,618,465 5.1 – 322,093 1.0 – 6,113,352 19.4 178 1,960,660 6 – 384,009 1.2 – 3,008,942 9.5 – 785,489 2.5 – 2,285,598 7.2 – 2,635,787 8.2 – 363,869 1.2 –

10,808,229 34.3 363 −2,504,464 −8.1 −86 −134,260 −0.5 – 3,397,258 10.7 178 478,464 1.3 −6,535,661 −21.0 −136 −736,475 −2.5 −85 −4,019,892 −12.9 −111 2,285,598 7.2 – −2,970,796 −10.2 −129 363,869 1.2 –

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in the 2002 national election. The HADEP/DEHAP and the CHP are exceptions to this end. It is important to note that the SP, which kept the Islamist Milli Görü¸s tradition under the informal leadership of Necmettin Erbakan, lost its market value while the AKP made a breakthrough by openly presenting its dissociation from the Islamist camp. Even though both parties—the AKP and the SP—split from the FP, it was only the SP that embraced the identity of its predecessor, which still represented the ‘old’ Islamist party under a different label.2 It is yet important to understand—why newness—was not a sufficient condition to reach a breakthrough result in this national election similar to the one achieved by the AKP. Why did not, for instance, the GP (Genç Parti—Young Party), a party formed by a ‘business tycoon shortly before the elections,’ and capturing 7.2 percent of the national vote on ‘a platform that combined crude populism with strident criticisms of the IMF, globalization, and the West’ (Sayari 2007, 199) reach a similar outcome? On this point, it is important to remember that the AKP was a party with a ‘rooted formation’ while the GP was only an ‘entrepreneurial party.’ While the latter refers to parties founded by individuals who are not affiliated to already organized groups, rooted parties refer to formations promoted by societal organizations.3 Even though the AKP dissociated itself from the Milli Görü¸s tradition, it not only had access to the FP’s organizational and mobilizational capacity but also, coming from a religious background, owned the ‘issue of democracy’ through confronting the repressive acts of the state elite against its mother party. It was both this rooted background and the ownership of the issue of democracy that gave power to the AKP both as opposed to the SP and the GP. The GP had no grassroots capacity that could mobilize the conservative masses to own the issue of democracy as the AKP’s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdo˘gan, could. The SP elite, on the other hand, was keen on pursuing a submissive strategy against the repressive acts of the state under Erbakan’s informal leadership and therefore lost the image of ‘competence’ in the eyes of its own rank-and-file and constituency. Now, let’s turn our attention to how the repressive acts of the state, from the conviction and imprisonment of Recep Tayyip Erdo˘gan to the headscarf crisis in Turkish parliament and the closure of the FP, were framed as an issue of democracy in a confrontational way by the founders of the AKP (who constituted the reformist faction within the Islamist party until their exit in 2001).

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The Conviction and Imprisonment of Recep Tayyip Erdo˘gan (1998–1999)

Recep Tayyip Erdo˘gan served as the mayor of the greater Istanbul municipality between 1994 and 1998. He was elected as the mayoral candidate of the Islamist RP in 1994 local elections. When Erdo˘gan was moving to the mayoral office, the RP leader Necmettin Erbakan had stated, ‘Istanbul is the capital city of the Islamic world. For sure, the mayor of such a city was going to be an elected RP official.’4 As the mayor of Istanbul, Erdo˘gan was often resorting to a terminology informed by Islamic themes just like the party leader. When he became the mayor of Istanbul, Erdo˘gan pronounced himself the imam of that city (Heper and Tokta¸s 2003, 164). He forbade alcohol at all municipal facilities and avoided Istanbul’s Western diplomatic and journalist community. On the other side, during his term in office, Erdo˘gan oversaw major improvements in municipal services and infrastructure (Jenkins 2003, 52). When he was visiting the southeastern province, Siirt in December 1997, he delivered a speech reciting a poem by Ziya Gökalp which included the lines, ‘the mosques are our barracks, the minarets our bayonets, the domes our helmets and the believers our soldiers.’ The Public Prosecutor pressed charges and, in April 1998, Erdo˘gan was convicted of inciting religious hatred under Article 312 of the Turkish Penal Code. His defense team found the lawsuit in violation of the Turkish constitution and the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights. Yet, he was sentenced to 10 months in prison and banned from politics for life by Diyarbakır’s State Security Court. As Shambayati (2004) argues, the Turkish judiciary in those years saw itself as the defender of the concepts such as republicanism, secularism, the indivisible integrity of the state and its presence in the political arena was a constant feature of Turkish political life. Erdo˘gan’s reaction against this verdict was confrontational against the Turkish judicial system. The day after the conviction, he organized a press conference in the municipal palace of Istanbul and voiced his criticism in the following words: I was sentenced to 10 months and my speech is used as an excuse. My speech, which called for brotherhood, peace, national unity and the indivisible integrity of the homeland, was made the subject of a court decision with political considerations. I should have been applauded for this speech. I am facing a charge that I never deserved. Unfortunately, the public conscience has lately been damaged due to the perception that politics

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interfere in judicial decisions. Democracy not only means the existence of elections but also the independence of the judiciary and judges. In principle, we respect judicial decisions. But our respect for judicial decisions does not mean that we accept unfair decisions. We will continue our democratic struggle to this end. We will certainly not be the subject of provocations in our struggle. I did not commit any disgraceful crime. I was not a traitor; I did not commit theft. I just expressed my ideas. Moreover, both in the presence of Allah and in the presence of the nation, I was a unifier, not a divider. As the elected mayor of Istanbul, I am at least responsible for the people of Istanbul. I am sure that this unjust conviction will be upheld by the High Court on appeal… In the event of a political ban, I will continue to serve my nation. Politics is not restricted to working for a political party, being a mayor, a deputy, prime minister or a president.5

Erdogan’s speech in the municipal palace is indeed an example of a ‘successful cultural performance on public stage’ in Altınordu’s (2016) words. A crowd of 5000 supporters in the streets of Saraçhane listened to the speech on loudspeakers. The supporters shouted slogans such as ‘Tell us shoot, we will shoot (Vur de vuralım)! Tell us die, we will die (Öl de ölelim)! Citizen, do not sleep, hold onto the chief (Vatanda¸s, ba¸skanına sahip çık)! Chief, we love you (Ba¸skan, seni cok seviyoruz).’6 The Milliyet newspaper framed the speech as ‘Erdo˘gan’s show of force (gövde gösterisi).’7 As one interviewee, who was a former FP activist that joined the AKP as a founding member in the year 2001 states, ‘the grassroot supporters were very encouraged when Tayyip Bey read a poem in the mosque and did not step back.’ Within his speech, Erdo˘gan was presenting himself as a leader who struggled for the democracy of his country. He also gave reference to the former Turkish Prime Minister, Adnan Menderes, who, as he stated, was sentenced to death for ‘political reasons’ in 1961: May God have mercy on him. Adnan Menderes was executed for political reasons. 30 years have passed since then. His honor was restored. This statesman, who was executed as a traitor, was then buried in Topkapı, under the auspices of a state ceremony. We do not want to witness similar injustices.8

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Similarly, on another occasion, he stated in the media that: My reference is Islam. If I cannot express it, what is the point of my living? The western people have freedom of religion. In Europe, people respect the church service and headscarf. But in Turkey, these are banned. Why cannot they be respected in Turkey?9

In the end, the decision was upheld in appeal and Erdo˘gan served four months of the sentence, from 24 March 1999 to 27 July 1999. The process starting from Erdo˘gan’s conviction to his four-monthlong imprisonment coincided with the intensification of factional rivalry between the reformists and the traditionalists within the RP’s successor, the FP. By the time Erdo˘gan was convicted, the Constitutional Court had already dissolved the RP. Erbakan had resigned from his post and was later formally banned from politics. Yet, he was still the informal leader of the RP’s successor, the FP and had assigned his custodian, Recai Kutan, to party leadership. The resignation of Erbakan from governmental office and his continuing influence over the party was raising reactions among the reformist activists. From their perspective, the party leadership was acting as if the party had accepted the ‘failure’ vis-à-vis the militarybureaucratic state on one hand, ruling the party based on policies that they severely refused, on the other. A former prominent member of the RP, Mehmet Bekaro˘glu (2007, 94), in his memoir book, also explains that it was this reaction that caused the beginning of conflicts between the reformist faction and the party leadership. Erdo˘gan, leading the reformist group within the FP, was continuously questioning Erbakan and his traditionalist dominant faction on the means of coping with a repressive state within the party. As discussed in Chapter 2, Erdo˘gan and the reformist team members such as Bülent Arınç, Abdullah and Abdüllatif Sener ¸ accused Erbakan and Kutan for pursuing a submissive strategy against the military-bureaucratic state and weakening the image of the party. Before going to prison, Erdo˘gan appeared on popular TV channels and large public debates. Without showing any hesitation or fear, he was raising his voice on the injustices of the Turkish political system. For instance, during the popular TV program 32. Gün, broadcast in 1998, he stated that:

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I do not think the dissolution of the RP was lawful or democratic. You ask me, how would I counter such an undemocratic decision as a political leader? No matter what, I would stand up against it and rule out the understanding that “freedom of expression is a threat to democracy.”10

4.1.2

Formation of the AKP: A Party That Confronts the Injustices of the Turkish Political System

In 1999, the FP was thrust into the center of another major crisis at the opening of the legislative term, when one female deputy from the party, Merve Kavakçı, came to the oath-taking ceremony in the parliament refusing to take off her headscarf. Similar to the RP, the secular state elite perceived the successor FP as the focus of religious activism. Once more, the Court of Appeals filed a petition to the Constitutional Court to ban the FP on 7 May 1999. The party was later banned on 22 June 2001 for violating the principle of secularism. The headscarf crisis in the parliament took place in the aftermath of a calamitous national election result for the FP. The vote percentage of the party had decreased by seven percentage points and the party had entered the parliament only as an opposition in 1999. The reason for defeat, according to the reformists in the party, was the submissive strategy of the traditionalist dominant faction against the repressive acts of the state. During the headscarf crisis, the reformists argued that the party had to stand with Kavakçı and her right to enter the parliament with a headscarf. One prominent reformist, Abdullah Gül, was already speaking in favor of Kavakçı’s ‘democratic rights’ to wear the headscarf in parliament: This is her lifestyle. There are many people in this country dressed like Kavakçı. The people having the same lifestyle and traditional values like Kavakçı elected her. She is their representative.11

The interview respondent, R13, also explains that the reformist faction in the party stood behind Merve Kavakçı during the parliamentary crisis while Erbakan and Kutan wanted her to be silent and resign from her duty: ‘This incident revealed that the reformists were a clearly separate and cohesive group opposing Erbakan’s policies. The party leadership left her alone. It was Tayyip Erdo˘gan and Abdullah Gül who supported her most against the regime.’

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Following the parliamentary crisis in May 1999, the reformists perceived the FP leadership more weakened in the eyes of the electorate for refraining from the main principles of the party (Bekaro˘glu 2007, 111). The extent of support for the reformists within the party was revealed at the FP’s party congress on 14 May 2000. Prior to this congress, the leading reformist, Abdullah Gül declared his candidacy for the party leadership against Erbakan’s choice, Recai Kutan. In fact, the leader of the reformists was considered Erdo˘gan but he could not run for leadership as he was banned from politics due to his conviction. The traditionalist dominant faction changed the party bylaws in order to avoid a possible failure. The change in the party bylaws was designed to deprive some reformists of their voting rights.12 Despite all these constraints, while Kutan received 633 votes, Gül managed to collect a total of 521 votes in the congress.13 The results showed the growing power of the reformist faction in the party and the success of their confrontational strategy against the state. The party congress in 2000 revealed that the change of the Erbakan/Kutan leadership was unlikely in the party. The reformists, receiving increasing support from the grassroots activists, calculated that a ‘split from the party’ would be the best option in the context of a competitive electoral market characterized by a volatile right-wing bloc. As Sayarı (2002, 18) notes, it was a period when ‘the number of parties represented in the parliament increased during the course of the legislative session with new parties forming after factional splits and through party switches by parliamentarians.’ Hence, the two competing factions established two separate parties following the Court decision to ban the FP. The AKP was built around the reformists and the SP was built around the traditionalists. In the 2002 national elections, the AKP received 34.3 percent, while the SP received only 2.5 percent of the votes (see Table 4.1). This result confirmed the view of the reformists that their confrontational strategy against the state (and perhaps the competence of their leadership) was more attractive to the voters than the submissive strategy of the traditionalists under the Erbakan/Kutan leadership. The campaigning process during the 2002 parliamentary elections was accompanied by the fact that the AKP leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was barred from running as a candidate since he had served a jail term for reading a poem in 1997. On 1 September 2002, the news captioned, ‘Aday Olamaz [He cannot be nominated],’ emphasized that, under no

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condition, Erdo˘gan could run as a candidate in the upcoming parliamentary elections and that an authorized person from the ‘highest judicial authority’ confirmed this point at an official state reception.14 As the election date, 3 November 2002, was approaching, the AKP was taking steps to find a way to solve the problem of Erdo˘gan’s nomination. Erdo˘gan had prompted the deletion of his criminal record at the Diyarbakır state security court, but later on, the prosecutor of the Supreme Court of Appeals declared the court decision, which was in favor of Erdo˘gan, null and void.15 In reaction to this decision, Erdo˘gan made the following statements in the media: ‘Turkey’s democracy is hit by another vital blow. The decision of the Supreme Court of Appeals is historical. But we will wait for the decision of the Supreme Board of Elections.’16 However, the Supreme Board of Elections also ruled against Erdo˘gan and that he could not run as a candidate in the upcoming parliamentary elections.17 Erdo˘gan defied this decision with following words: This is no longer a personal struggle of Tayyip Erdogan. Determination of our struggle is as halal and holy as the white milk of our mothers. The votes that will be cast for the AKP will also be halal and holy. They are tying a knot against our love for service. But it will be resolved on November 3rd. They are not trying to hinder my candidacy, but the will of the nation. They want to block the nation’s pathway to pride through these prohibitions. Those who desire a dark Turkey will never reach their ambitions. Turkey will come out of this dark tunnel. This homeland is our passion. There is no room for animosity on this path. This state is the state of the nation and is inviolable. This wound will certainly be healed.18

The following section demonstrates how the AKP, through this confrontational strategy, managed to own the issue of democracy and turn into a populist actor, acquiring support from two different social groups outside of the traditional Islamist constituency: the liberal intellectuals and the Kurds. 4.1.3

Support from the Kurds and Liberal Intellectuals for the AKP in 2002 Elections

The previous section has demonstrated the confrontational strategy used by the founders of the AKP against the repressive acts of the state prior to the 2002 national elections. The AKP elite continuously framed the repressive acts of the state toward their party and their party officials as

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an issue of democracy. In their public speeches covered in the mainstream media, they often referred to the ‘freedom of expression,’ ‘struggle for democracy’ and ‘nation’s will’ whenever their reference to religion and religious symbols was met with political pressure. This section illustrates how the AKP owned the ‘issue of democracy’ through this strategy and turned into a ‘populist’ actor, based on Laclau’s (2005) theory on the emergence of populism. I particularly focus on the organized support that the AKP received from two groups: the liberals and ethnonationalist Kurdish voters in 2002 elections. These groups were outside of the traditional religious constituency of the AKP’s predecessors (except for the pious Kurdish citizens). Prior to the 2002 national election, the liberal intellectuals in Turkey were demanding a government that could both economically and politically incorporate Turkey into the EU, cooperate with the US administration on the future of Northern Iraq and initiate a diplomatic resolution to the Kurdish conflict. The Kurd from the ethnonationalist movement in Turkey (who were solely and traditionally supporting the pro-Kurdish parties until the emergence of the AKP) desired a government that would finally recognize the Kurdish identity in the country, provide the necessary political and cultural rights to the Kurdish community living within the Turkish territory and negotiate with the Kurdish rebel group (PKK) to find a peaceful settlement for the Kurdish conflict. Despite some degree of overlap in the demands of the two groups from the next party in power (such as their joint demand for a peace settlement on the Kurdish conflict), the two also represented ‘a highly heterogeneous reality’ since the liberals desired Turkey’s integration into the global financial markets while this was something the ethnonationalist Kurds would neither prioritize nor favor, given their leftist/Marxist political background. Just like Laclau’s (2005) theory of populism suggests, the heterogeneity of demands took the form of an ‘equivalential homogeneity’ when the AKP owned the ‘issue of democracy’ at the discursive level via confronting a repressive state that threatened the future of Turkish ‘democracy.’ The ethnonationalist Kurds finally set eyes on a different type of actor on the political stage, which could fearlessly challenge their main ‘enemy’, which was the Turkish state. The liberal intellectuals, on the other side, considered the AKP as a chance for Turkey that could help elevate the country to the level of a ‘Western democracy,’ because similar to the Kurds, they perceived it as an actor that could eradicate the main challenge to Turkish democracy, which was the military-bureaucratic state establishment.

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Liberal intellectuals: The term ‘liberal intellectuals’ in Turkey has been used to refer to a certain group of intellectuals that helped the legitimization of the AKP government during its rise to power since the party lacked its own media and intellectuals (Ersoy and Üstüner 2016, 406). This group was composed of a wide array of prominent public figures that shaped the public debates in the first decade of the millennium. It included journalists, newspaper columnists, novelists (including the Nobel laureate, Orhan Pamuk), movie stars, singers, artists, historians, sociologists and political scientists. Another label attributed to this group is the self-accredited title “Yetmez ama Evetçiler [‘Not Enough But Yes’ Group]” as a result of the public campaign they jointly initiated in support for a ‘yes’ vote on a constitutional amendment package in the referendum of 12 September 2010. The package, consisting of 25 articles, aimed at a major reorganization of the Turkish judiciary, mainly the Constitutional Court and the High Council of Judges and Public Prosecutors (Hakimler ve Savcılar Yüksek Kurulu) and the narrowing down of the area of competence of military courts in favor of civilian courts (Kalaycioˇglu 2012). As Ersoy and Üstüner (2016, 414) argued, the liberal intellectuals heralded this package ‘as the founding moment of the “Second Republic,” or synonymously, a “New Turkey” since the amendments were believed to be the start of the process to rid the country of the last remnants of the September 12 regime.’ While supporting the package, they also emphasized that the reforms were going to be ‘not sufficient’ to completely eradicate the authoritarian, statist and tutelary legacy of the military-bureaucratic state elite. However, the origins of the liberal intellectual support for the AKP date back to the 2002 national elections. I will mainly focus on two intellectuals, Cengiz Çandar and Hasan Cemal, in how they referred to the repressive state behavior and the AKP’s democracy discourse as a justification for supporting the AKP in public debates. Cengiz Çandar was back then a columnist in Yeni Safak ¸ daily (and later also wrote for Radikal, Referans, Hürriyet ), while Hasan Cemal was a columnist in Milliyet daily. Among the liberal intellectuals that voiced support for the AKP, these two intellectuals were also among the group of ‘experts to be consulted’ and ‘columnists considering themselves powerful enough to be a part of the ruling elite of the media’ as a result of their acquaintances with the liberal intelligentsia residing in the US and the EU.19 Both Cemal and Çandar had a shared concern over the situation of human rights and the peaceful settlement of the Kurdish question cared about Turkey’s acceptance as an

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influential and respected actor by the major Western powers such as the United States and the European Union (Ayan Musil 2021, 20). Upon the foundation of the AKP in August 2001, Çandar in his column wrote the following: With regard to its human capital, the AKP has a ‘local’ and ‘conservative’ foundation. But with regard to its discourse, it sparkles with the potential of becoming a globalist party. There is no other party that has reference to the ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ and ‘European Convention on Human Rights’ in its program. It is also the first party that constrains the term limits of the party chairman, envisages the renewal of the party cadres and pictures a generational change within its structure… Moreover, it has a strong and correct understanding of secularism. In contrast with the mentality of 28 February, which foresees secularism as a foundation for democracy (a definition used nowhere in the world), it sees secularism as an assurance for democracy. This is how the relationship between democracy and secularism should be like. A provision in the party program states that “the AKP defines secularism as the impartiality of the state visa-vis different types of religious beliefs”… From these perspectives, the AKP is ‘new’ and ‘reformist’ and the acquisition of Turkish politics. It has to protect itself against the ‘knights templar’ and the ‘battalions of corruption.’20

As observed in these statements, Çandar’s positive view of the AKP stems from its discourse on democracy and human rights reflected in its party program (similar to the discourse of the party leader revealed in the mainstream media) as well as the impact of the military-bureaucratic state on Turkish democracy, silencing the Islamist parties through postmodern coups and closures (i.e. the ‘February 28 mentality’). On 1 September 2002, two months before the parliamentary election, one can also observe similar traits in his views, with reference to the political ban over Erdo˘gan’s candidacy: As a matter of fact, the constitution is a by-product of the military regime of 1980-83. It was adopted by the Constituent Assembly verified by the military junta. Although many of the clauses of this constitution have been changed over the last twenty years, still by its spirit, by its structure, by its format, by its content, it is the constitution of a military regime. You can’t have a country to be run by the constitution of a military regime if you are aiming to be in the family of the European Union, the unity of the democratic nations…

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In a country, which is a candidate of the European Union, and in the year 2002, you have people blocked from running in elections and one of the gentlemen who is blocked from running is the probable Prime Minister of Turkey. So if you add all these elements, what I feel—and I feel bitterly— that Turkish democracy is incomplete. It is wounded by this decision. I hope that it will not be a fatal wound for Turkey’s democracy.21

If we check the statements of Hasan Cemal in his columns in Milliyet daily, prior to the parliamentary elections (particularly in the months of September–October 2002), we note that he was not as convinced as Çandar on the ‘post-Islamist’ identity of the AKP. In midst September 2002, Cemal visited New York and Washington DC in order to observe, in his own words, ‘how Turkey is perceived in the US’ and ‘what the American expectations are from the next Turkish government.’22 In his column on 17 September 2002, he noted that ‘in Washingtonian conversations, Tayyip Erdo˘gan is perceived as a representative of moderate-Islamism, and yet, there are several question marks about him. But, since his party is leading in the polls, there is a general tendency not to mention anything negative about him.’23 In another column, Cemal also noted that due to a prospective intervention in Iraq, the US deemed Turkey’s parliamentary election important and that it desired not only a cooperative relationship with the incoming government but also a stable Turkish regime, especially in terms of its civil–military relations.24 This column implied that the AKP’s background in ‘radical Islamism’ was one of the main concerns in the US due to the catastrophic experience that the RP had with the Turkish military.25 These observations, accompanied with other observations on Turkey’s accession to the EU seemed to have an impact on Cemal’s future columns in which he analyzed the identity of the AKP. Referring to Abdullah Gül’s talk at a conference in Brussels, Cemal in another column raised the following questions about the party leadership: Since the experiences are still fresh in people’s memory, the question of a “hidden agenda” comes up… People like Tayyip Erdo˘gan, Bülent Arınç and Abdullah Gül should give an honest answer to themselves: What did they understand from Koran yesterday, what do they understand from it today?26

On the other hand, Cemal, just like Çandar, was vocal about the political ban over Tayyip Erdo˘gan’s candidacy. He wrote the following:

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Tayyip Erdo˘gan is barred from the elections. Is this good? No, it is not. It does not go together with democracy. It gives clues about the fact that the judiciary can sometimes be political. This is an investment in instability... Turkey could not have political stability for years as a consequence of dissolving parties, barring parties from elections or banning political leaders from running in elections… We hope that the political institutions, in the aftermath of November 3rd , will introduce a new agenda of reforms that can change the legislations, which weaken stability and democracy in this country… Meanwhile Tayyip Erdo˘gan also has an important task. He needs to provide his own, open self-criticism in order to show that he has changed. Otherwise, the skepticisms over the possibility of a ‘hidden agenda’ will prevail and poison politics.27

These statements show that Cemal was paying attention to revealing the skepticism over the image that the AKP was publicly portraying in the media and in its party program. In this sense, while criticizing the repressive acts of the military-bureaucratic state without hesitation, he was also conveying the US and EU perceptions of the AKP to the Turkish media. Even though he was not as positive as Çandar about the AKP’s identity as a post-Islamist, ‘democratic’ party, his messages were favoring such an identity. He underlined the need for the party leadership to show consistency and sincerity in this new identity. Even though his messages did not show explicit support for the party, his columns had in-depth coverage of the ‘desire’ that the AKP should ‘sincerely’ become a post-Islamist party, have cooperative interactions with the West and target reforming the undemocratic institutions of a military-bureaucratic state structure in Turkey. These issues constituted a significant part of the public debates during the 2002 electoral campaigns. In this sense, Erdo˘gan’s public statements against the repressive acts of the state—quoted in the above section—overlapped well with the expectations of the liberal intellectuals from the AKP. The Kurdish nationalist constituency: With regard to the impact of the AKP’s confrontational discourse against the Turkish state on the preferences of the Kurdish ethnonationalist group (both in terms of voting for the AKP or joining the AKP as a member of the party), the interviews conducted with the AKP activists and the pro-Kurdish party activists provide valuable insights. It should yet first be noted that the Kurds living in the Kurdish political region of Turkey are and have been a diverse group in terms of their voting behavior. According to Yavuz and Özcan (2006, 106), the Kurdish landscape is divided into three

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political groups: (1) secular-anti-traditional Kurds who usually support the PKK-led movement and the ethnonationalist pro-Kurdish parties; (2) assimilated Kurds who prefer to be active in center-right and center-left parties to get elected to the parliament; and (3) Muslim-Kurds, who identify themselves more with religion than ethnicity and vote for religious parties. Even though the tribal and class-related differences distort the boundaries between these groups, it is argued that these core differences have been the driving forces of voting behavior among the Kurds in Turkey. That being said, the explanations that aim to shed light on the rising competition between the AKP and the pro-Kurdish party in the Kurdish constituency during the 2002 and 2007 national elections focus mainly on identity-related reasons. That is to say, the AKP emphasized common Islamic ties and the notion of the Islamic brotherhood to constrain Kurdish nationalism, standing in contrast to the pro-Kurdish parties that were campaigning on the strong rejection of an Islamic identity to resist the strict Islamification policies put in place by the state aimed at diminishing ethnic identity (Al 2019; Aydın and Emrence 2015; Tezcür 2010; Sarigil 2018; Arikan Akda˘g 2016). As noted in Chapter 2, the Islamist RP was also popular in the Kurdish political region. Just like the RP’s previous appeal to the Kurdish constituency, it has been argued that the AKP and the pro-Kurdish parties use a discourse touching on Kurdish ethnic and Islamic identity and therefore receive higher levels of support in comparison to other parties among the Kurds (Çarkoglu and Kalaycioglu 2021, 222). The Figs. 4.1 and 4.2 show the percentage of votes that the political parties gained in the Kurdish political region in 2002 and 2007 elections. Even though the Kurdish political region by no means represents the Kurdish constituency due to the mobility of Kurds toward the urban centers over the course of Turkish modernization (Çarkoglu and Kalaycioglu 2021, 221–23), the comparison of the vote percentages in this region more or less reveals the competition between the AKP and the pro-Kurdish parties in 2002 and 2007. While the pro-Kurdish party was represented by DEHAP in 2002 national elections, it was represented by the independent candidates (that later formed the DTP parliamentary group) in the 2007 elections. According to further statistical evidence that compares 2002 elections with 2007 elections, the AKP had a much superior performance in the Kurdish political region in 2007 elections compared to 2002; in other words, it is clearer that the AKP won over some of the Kurdish nationalist vote in 2007 (Tezcür 2010, 783). In 2002, the AKP was only a

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Fig. 4.1 2002 Election results in the Kurdish political region (Note The figure shows the average vote percentage among the following provinces for each party: A˘grı, Batman, Bingöl, Bitlis, Diyarbakır, Hakkari, I˘gdır, Kars, Mardin, Mu¸s, Siirt, Sanlıurfa, ¸ Sırnak, ¸ Tunceli, Van)

Fig. 4.2 2007 Election results in the Kurdish political region (Note The figure shows the average vote percentage among the following provinces for each party: A˘grı, Batman, Bingöl, Bitlis, Diyarbakır, Hakkari, I˘gdır, Kars, Mardin, Mu¸s, Siirt, Sanlıurfa, ¸ Sırnak, ¸ Tunceli, Van)

newly emerging party in the party system. But even as a new party, the AKP was able to appeal to the voters in the Kurdish political region and received the second highest number of votes whereas the SP, representing the traditionalist cadres of the former Islamist RP, showed a poor performance (see Fig. 4.1). This challenges the notion that the Kurdish votes were divided between those who prioritize religious and ethnic concerns. According to the pro-Kurdish party activists that I interviewed, the AKP indeed showed continuity with the RP in terms of appealing to the pious

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Kurds due to its religious background. However, the responses underlining the importance of religion also implied a shared understanding of the psychology of repression rather than purely an emphasis on religious values. Considering both ethnic and religious ideologies and the parties that represented these ideologies were marginalized in the 1990s by a military-bureaucratic repressive state, a successful politician with a religious background and one that leads a party with a confrontational discourse against such a state was more likely to appeal to this conservative Kurdish constituency than any other religious party. This is a point that did not receive sufficient attention in analyzing the electoral preferences of the Kurdish voters in the 2000s. Guiler (2021) has recently advanced a theory linking political victimhood to electoral advantage, building upon Nugent’s (2020) analysis of the psychology of repression and polarization. She has indeed found that when political persecution is inflicted across identity lines and experienced collectively by multiple groups (such as those claiming the Kurdish and Muslim identities in the Turkish context of the late 1990s or early 2000s), the culture of shared victimhood decreases in-group identification and minimizes the distance between groups that now share this collective experience. This theory is very much in line with how Erdogan, or the AKP leadership, showed competence in owning the issue of democracy in the eyes of the Kurdish nationalist voters. On the question of why the AKP was relatively more successful (compared to other parties, i.e. the SP) in 2002 elections, a long-term pro-Kurdish party activist (E7) responded as follows: The RP was already successful in provinces like Van and Batman in the 1990s. When the Islamist discourse merges with a criticism of Kemalism, it already creates impact on the Kurds. In addition to this already existing discourse, the AKP further emphasized democratization and the EU membership. In other words, the AKP built upon the legacy of the RP and improved its discourse by adding the issue of the EU membership and democracy.

Further noting, E6 stated the following details for the AKP’s appeal to the Kurds: During his term as the mayor of the greater Istanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdo˘gan showed himself as an oppositional leader that can stand up against the political order. Without hesitation, he was able to express his criticisms over the state policies against the Kurds. We should not forget that after the February 28 crisis, the state apparatus had turned into a security apparatus.

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The AKP claims on the EU membership, democratization and resolution of the Kurdish conflict had increased the Kurdish citizens’ interest in the AKP.

Another similar statement comes from the response of E15 on the same question: The problem of beliefs and religious freedoms (such as the ban on headscarf) was also a problem of democracy in those years. The AKP emerged with a heavy discourse on change, emphasized the EU membership, civil and political rights. The AKP promised to overcome Ergenekon and find a resolution to the Kurdish issue. The AKP entrapped the Kurds with such a rhetoric similar to the way it entrapped the liberal intellectuals and left-wing groups in those years.

According to the statement of E15 above, the AKP earned the trust of the Kurds as well as the liberal and left-wing groups by deceiving them by utilizing such a rights-based discourse. This interviewee uses the term, Ergenekon, to refer to the members of the country’s military and security forces that had used repressive measures both against Islamist and Kurdish activists. Furthermore, the AKP activists (R4, R5, R9) from the Kurdish political region explained the impact of such a confrontational discourse on their decision to join the party as well as the on the preferences of the Kurdish constituency in the following way. R4, who did not have any affiliation with a political party prior to the emergence of the AKP, stated that: I was not a member of any party before the AKP. I worked in the civil society sector. In order to serve to the community, I thought working for an NGO was a better option than working for a political party. I did not think that a political party could be a place that produces solutions. When the AKP was established, the party leadership proposed me to be the provincial chair of the party. I felt that the AKP was different from other parties and that their only concern was to serve the people… It was also more about the brave leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdo˘gan than the AKP. I was a student when Tayyip Bey became the mayor of the larger metropolitan city of Istanbul and I was admiring him already. We were drifting in a wind called, ‘There is a man named Tayyip’ (‘Tayyip diye bir adam var’ rüzgarında savuruluyorduk).

Meanwhile, from the perspective of R5:

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The confrontation of Erdo˘gan against the military affected the people. He did not escape like Erbakan did. The Kurds have been so much repressed in the past. Erdo˘gan did not step back against the Turkish military and the Kurds started admiring him. The Kurds like such hawkish men (¸sahin gibi adam).

The interviewee, R9, on the other hand, drew similarities between the ethnic Kurds and the Muslims in terms of their long-term repression by the Turkish state and how the AKP emerged as a party challenging the repressive policies of the state: The Republic of Turkey was founded upon the denial of ethnicity and religion. Yet, both are extremely important for society and for our culture. For instance, in Belgium, there are people speaking three different languages but they can still together. In Turkey, speaking the Kurdish language and wearing a headscarf were both considered problematic. Years ago, I wanted to join a military wedding with my wife, but they did not let us in because she was wearing a headscarf. I was asking myself “where do we live for God’s sake?” This was our own country, it was excluding its own people. The AKP emerged as a party of hope and cared about the service for the people.

All in all, these responses imply that, among the Kurdish nationalists, there was a shared perception of being marginalized or excluded and among them were those who were drawing parallels with the excluded groups due to their religious identity. Without any survey data, these interviews are surely not sufficient to explain the shifting voting preferences of an ethnonationalist group. But the aim here (as in the entire book) is to challenge the existing explanations and provide the plausibility of an argument on the emergence of the Kurdish organized support for the AKP in 2002 elections. This organized support reached unprecedented levels in 2007. The AKP leadership, most importantly, Recep Tayyip Erdo˘gan, was owning the issue of democracy in the eyes of a group within the Kurdish nationalist constituency and gave the image of a leader that cared about the common victims of the same antagonist, systemic state practices in 2002 elections. Table 4.2 summarizes the causal mechanism that turned the 2002 national elections into an opportunity for democratization.

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Table 4.2 The causal mechanism that turned the 2002 elections into an ‘Opportunity for Democratization’

Theory

Scope condition

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Outcome

Discursive opportunity structure (DOS) for the party to confront the state

Moderation theory: The state acts in a repressive way in a setting where parties are included in elections Closure of the FP; conviction of Erdogan, court ruling against Erdogan’s candidacy prior to the elections

Issue ownership theory: The party confronts the state and owns the ‘issue of democracy’

Laclau’s theory of populism: Plurality of unsatisfied social demands unite under this issue

The party receives the organized support of diverse social groups during elections

Erdo˘gan’s confrontational statements, such as ‘They are not trying to hinder my candidacy, but the will of the nation’; ‘We will continue our democratic struggle to this end’

Liberal intellectuals that care about economic stability and democracy as well as some Kurdish nationalist groups who are the victims of state repression show sympathy for the AKP

The AKP receives the support of intellectuals and some Kurdish nationalist groups

Observable Turkey manifestations gained candidacy status for the EU membership in 1999. Banning parties and military interventions started being publicly criticized in mainstream media outlets

4.2

2007 National Elections and the AKP

The parliamentary elections of 2007 were held on 22 July after a fiveyear rule of the AKP in government. Unlike the 2002 parliamentary elections, the AKP was now a party that could not only be tested with its discourse on democracy but also its policies as well as its interaction with a military-bureaucratic state as a government party. From the time it came to power in November 2002 to the EU accession negotiations held between December 2004 and October 2005, the liberal intelligentsia both at home and Europe praised the AKP for its progress

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on EU-related reforms. Öni¸s and Yılmaz (2009) consider this period as one of the most successful periods of economic growth in recent Turkish economic history since Turkey managed to attract significant amounts of foreign direct investment, took giant steps in democratization by a series of major reforms building upon the initiatives of the earlier administration and dealing with the Kurdish question through extending cultural and language rights to its citizens of Kurdish origin. The civil-military relations during the AKP’s first term in office were also more or less cooperative and dedicated to Turkey’s global engagement and integration with the EU. General Hilmi Özkök, who served as the Chief of Staff between 2002 and 2006, expressed his view that the Turkish armed forces (TAF) should always support EU membership because Turkey’s ongoing conflicts (such as the armed conflict with the PKK and the disputes with Greece over the Aegean Sea) would be resolved as a result of integration into the EU; as opposed to the more conservative generals in the army who were critical of certain EU demands and the issue of minority ˙ Ba¸sbu˘g, the rights (Aydinli 2009). For instance, in 2004, General Ilker commander of the Turkish Land Forces, had claimed that nobody could demand or expect Turkey to make collective arrangements for a certain ethnic group in the political arena, outside of the cultural arena, that would endanger the nation-state structure as well as the unitary state structure (Yeˇgen 2011, 77 cited in Yadirgi 2017, 228–29). In terms of Özkök’s successor, General Ya¸sar Büyükanıt, who served as the Chief of Staff between 2006 and 2009, the civil–military relations experienced more tensions especially with regard to the staunch position of the Turkish armed forces on the ban on headscarf in public places. This position was particularly going to be a problem for the election of the next president of Turkey. It had become clear that the AKP, holding 66 percent of the seats in parliament, was going to choose the next president of Turkey. Yet, the AKP’s probable candidates for the office of presidency, among whom was also the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdo˘gan himself, were facing a major problem: If one of them were to be elected as president, it meant that Turkey was for the first time going to have a first lady wearing a headscarf. This was a cause of concern for the military-bureaucratic elite since the president of Turkey symbolically represented the secular character of the country. The retiring President, Ahmet Necdet Sezer, for example, refused to invite the headscarf wearing wives of AKP Deputies to official dinners and receptions (Polat 2009, 137). In his farewell speech on 13 April 2007, Sezer also stated that,

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“since the establishment of the Republic, the secular regime in Turkey has never faced a danger as grave as it does today.”28 Meanwhile, the AKP had not earned the trust of the secular-minded masses in Turkish society. The main opposition, CHP leader, Deniz Baykal, also a played a polarizing role in the process via adopting a more nationalist discourse with a strong emphasis on secularism, associating the AKP with reactionary Islam and failing to bring any socioeconomic issues to public debates. The 1982 constitution had given more than normal powers to the president. The Chief of Staff, Ya¸sar Büyükanıt, holding a press conference in April 2007, had noted that the Turkish armed forces were concerned about the Presidency since the next President also was going to be the Commander-in-Chief (Polat 2009, 136). On 24 April 2007, Recep Tayyip Erdo˘gan announced the nomination of Abdullah Gül, one of the most noticeable founders of the AKP, for the office of presidency. Gül’s nomination was decided by Erdo˘gan upon consultations with other members of his own elite circle.29 On the same day, the opposition CHP leader, Deniz Baykal, made a public statement arguing that Gül can neither be a neutral president nor represent all the Turkish people since he was Erdo˘gan’s own nominee and that his party was not consulted in making this decision.30 Baykal further declared that the CHP was ready to appeal the results of the parliamentary voting to the Constitutional Court unless there was a two-thirds quorum (meaning that at least 367 MPs out of 550 had to cast a vote during the first round of elections).31 The next section elaborates on the two major political decisions made by the military-bureaucratic state during the parliamentary crisis on electing the President of Turkey in April–May 2007. The first of these decisions was the biased decision of the Constitutional Court in favor of the CHP’s position and the second was the e-memorandum of 27 April issued on the website of the Chief of General Staff, with the intention to give a warning to the AKP leadership. It also shows how these acts turned into a salient issue representing the ‘democratic struggle of a popularly supported political party vis-à-vis a repressive state.’ This was the way the AKP chose to frame these acts prior to the parliamentary election of July 2007.

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E-Memorandum of 27 April 2007

27 April 2007 is considered one of the most critical dates witnessed in the recent political history of Turkey. On this day, the Turkish parliament, whose 550 seats were dominated by 352 AKP deputies, held the first round of voting to elect the next President of Turkey. According to the constitutional framework, a candidate required a two-thirds majority (367 votes) to be elected in the first two rounds. If there was no winner in the first two rounds, the winning threshold was supposed to drop into a simple majority (276 votes) in the third round. However, the CHP argued that for any valid presidential election to take place, the parliamentary session needed to have a two-thirds quorum.32 This required that at least 367 deputies had to be present for the first round of voting to be valid. The CHP boycotted the parliamentary session, which left 352 AKP deputies joined by nine independents in the assembly—six short of 367.33 In this first round, Abdullah Gül received 357 out of 361 votes in the parliament. While the AKP-dominated parliament decided to go for the second round of voting in the upcoming days, this result led the CHP to file a lawsuit in Turkey’s Constitutional Court, calling for the annulment of the presidential vote due to a lack of two-thirds quorum in the parliament and seeking new parliamentary elections. On 27 April, the media had portrayed the political tension in Ankara with such headlines as ‘the most critical threshold in the path toward presidential palace.’34 The anxiety had also been reflected in street demonstrations two weeks earlier. On 14 April 2007, a mass demonstration had taken place in Ankara labeled as the “Republican Rally” by the media. Even before Erdo˘gan announced Abdullah Gül’s name as a candidate for the post of presidency, the demonstration organized by the Atatürkist Thought Association (ADD-Atatürkçü Dü¸sünce Derne˘gi) had gathered about 300,000 people opposing the idea that Erdo˘gan was going to pick the next presidential candidate of Turkey. They had marched toward the Atatürk Mausoleum, waving national flags, clutching portraits of Atatürk, and shouting slogans like ‘Turkey is secular and will remain secular.’35 The demonstration in Ankara indeed was going to fuel further mass gatherings in Istanbul, Izmir and in other big cities that would feature the representatives of the CHP, Kemalist civil society organizations as well as former generals such as Sener ¸ Eruygur and Hur¸sit Tolon (Anisin and Ayan Musil 2021, 17).

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Hours after the first round of presidential elections on 27 April held in a politically polarized atmosphere, the Turkish military posted a statement on the website of the General Staff, stating concerns over the ongoing political tension and debates on the secular nature of the regime. The statement included the following sentences: • The presidential election process has focused on the debate about secularism. The Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) follows this situation with concern. • The TAF is one of the sides in this debate and an advocate of secularism. When necessary, it will show clearly and unequivocally display its behavior. • Anyone who opposes the Great Leader Atatürk’s understanding of “how happy is the one who says I am a Turk” is and will remain the enemy of the Republic of Turkey. • In order to preserve these qualities of the Republic, the TAF maintains its determination to fully fulfill the obligations ascribed to it by law.36 In addition to these grave expressions, the statement also included references to certain public activities held throughout the country that the TAF considered a threat to the secular nature of the regime. These activities included the celebration of the ‘holy birth week,’ dedicated to the life of Prophet Mohammed in public schools in April, which according to the TAF, did not comply with the directives of the Ministry of National Education; and the “Quran reading competition” among children, which was held on the day of 23 April, a National Sovereignty and Children’s Day that officially commemorates the foundation of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey.37 The TAF’s statement created a shockwave both within Turkish society and the EU. The EU issued an open criticism against the TAF’s behavior. The enlargement commissioner, Olli Rehn, stated that the timing and the tone of—what he considered was—‘the e-coup’ had the potential to affect the outcome of the presidential election process and yet Turkey should remain committed to democratic principles.38 The opposition party, the CHP, interpreted the TAF’s statement as a memorandum and that the AKP should take this statement seriously otherwise ‘it seemed the TAF would do what is necessary.’39 One day after this memorandum, the AKP

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took the turn to release a confrontational statement against the TAF in public media. The government spokesman, Cemil Çiçek, stated that: The General Staff is an institution that operates under the Office of Prime Ministry. In a democratic country committed to rule of law, it is unthinkable for the General Staff to issue a statement against an elected government. The fact that the statement of the General Staff was shared in media and published on the website has a meaning. The goal is to influence the decision of the Constitutional Court… It is impossible for our government to remain insensitive to the foundational values of our state. It is unfortunate that the TAF’s statement includes erroneous assertions. It is essential to resolve all conflicts within the framework of democracy and rule of law.40

Çiçek further underlined that: Instead of spending our time on such fruitless debates, we should move forward and create a strong economy that finds its place in global markets… One should refrain from engaging in public acts that would damage the country’s reputation at the international level, threaten its economic stability and democracy, and inflict a wound in the nation’s conscience.41

The media further outlined that the AKP would not step back from nominating Abdullah Gül for the office of presidency.42 In case the Constitutional Court decides to annul the results of the first round of elections, it will be ready to hold early parliamentary elections.43 In the news, it was stated that the prime minister Erdo˘gan talked to the Chief of the General Staff on the phone and his words were quoted as follows: This country has prosecutors and judges. If there are such public concerns about our government as the TAF claims, it should be these bodies to start a prosecution. I do not understand why such concerns are the subject of a statement issued by the TAF. Moreover, why does the TAF share this statement with the media?44

In a public gathering, Erdo˘gan further called out to the nation and expressed the following statements:

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From time to time, the social unity and political harmony of our country can be exposed to misadventures and catastrophes. In the past, our precious nation had to pay heavy costs for such political catastrophes, which led to the erosion of stability and trust in the country. Fortunately, our nation does not and will not give any chance for such opportunists. The nation and the history will never forgive those who aim to undermine our spirit of solidarity, cooperation and social tissue.45

The statements made by Çiçek and the prime minister Erdo˘gan show the highly challenging nature of the AKP’s reaction against the TAF’s interventionist stance. First, they represent a strong deviation from the position of the former Islamist parties led by Erbakan that rather chose to bow down before the TAF whenever there was a conflict in civil–military relations. Second, they represent a certain image of a party (or a political leader in the case of Erdo˘gan) who is no more obedient to the state but rather stands still and sides with ‘the people.’ In this sense, the AKP continued the strategy of framing the acts of the repressive state (in this case, the military memorandum) as an ‘issue of democracy.’ 4.2.2

Court Decision on Presidential Elections on 1 May 2007

On 1 May 2007, the Constitutional Court announced its decision regarding the results of the first round of parliamentary voting for the presidency. In a news conference, Ha¸sim Kılıç, deputy head of the court told that the court decided to stop the process of the presidential election. It ruled that the voter turnout in the parliamentary session, which was 361, was insufficient and that the small turnout rendered the vote invalid. Moreover, the court’s decision was final and could not be overruled.46 The reaction of the AKP to the decision of the annulment of the first round of the election was to respect this decision and call for early national elections to be held in July to propose constitutional amendments to presidential and parliamentary elections.47 According to the proposal, the president was going to be popularly elected in two rounds with the possibility of reelection (instead of the current single seven-year term).48 The proposal also included a reduction in the term of parliament from five years to four, a definition of the parliamentary quorum at 184 for both sessions and elections, and a lowering of the age of eligibility for Members of Parliament to 25.49

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The following two months until the date of the early parliamentary election (22 July 2007) included several other ups and downs. The parliament endorsed the AKP’s constitutional amendments on May 7.50 The president yet vetoed these amendments on May 25, declared that there was ‘no justification’ for the direct election of the president and suggested that it would be better if the amendments were debated in public and then discussed in parliament.51 The Constitution did not allow Sezer to veto the amendments a second time. Hence, the parliament passed the amendments again in the same form on June 1.52 On June 5, CHP petitioned the Constitutional Court to annul the package of amendments, arguing that the one on holding parliamentary elections every four years failed by one vote to meet the two-thirds vote requirement and that the entire package had to be invalid if one of its components was invalid.53 On June 18, the president petitioned the Constitutional Court to invalidate the amendment package.54 On July 5, the Court rejected the President’s appeal, paving the way for a referendum on the amendments on October 21.55 In July 2007, the prime minister Erdo˘gan campaigning across Turkey, was referring to the ‘injustices’ of the political system via criticizing the behavior of the Turkish military, the Constitutional Court and the main opposition CHP while stressing his party’s goal as nothing but purely ‘service to the people.’ The AKP campaign slogan ‘Durmak Yok Yola Devam (Non-stop Ahead)’ not only gave the image of party determination to continue the political and economic reforms (Soyaltın 2017, 209), but also implied a confrontational strategy showing that the party was strong enough to clear the military-bureaucratic hurdles on its way toward the ideal of serving to the people. The slogan, according to Baykan (2018, 100), had a simple and concrete message that underlined the achievements of the hardworking AKP and it could easily appeal to the large segments of the society. The image of determination was reflective of a defensive mission, arising from the necessity to engage the secular establishment and survive in power via maintaining the support of the majorities (Çınar 2012). In the provinces that Erdo˘gan visited as part of his party campaign, he was making the following exemplary statements targeting the state establishment composed of a triangle of the main opposition CHP, the military and the Constitutional Court. In Samsun, he said, ‘the CHP put blocks on the scales of justice.’56 Implying the e-memorandum issued by the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF), in Kastamonu, he did not hesitate

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to mention how it delays the AKP’s economic achievements: ‘The share indices have almost become fifty per cent. It could have been well above fifty per cent if some circles had paid attention to certain sensitivities.’57 Targeting the CHP chairman, Deniz Baykal, during the AKP’s Istanbul rally, Erdo˘gan stated, ‘give up exploiting the meaning of “Atatürk’s party.” There are people who believe in the principles of Atatürk and the implementation of these principles. You literally ruined Atatürk’s party.’58 During a TV program on national elections, regarding the question of who the next president would be, Erdo˘gan stated, ‘it should be someone from a party who gains the highest percentage of votes in this national election. Once my party receives the highest number of votes, we will consider this result as an instruction given to us by the people. Are we going to respect the decision of the people or move in the direction of the demands of a minority?’59 He was also criticizing the media that, Erdo˘gan argued, was siding with the state establishment. During a rally in Ankara, he uttered the following statements: Why does the media press upon the AKP this much? There is no prime minister that bows and scrapes in front of them… They say, “get ready for the dark days ahead, after the presidential elections.” With all due respect, these newscasts are not objective. If you are not objective, you will get a response that you deserve. Who says I am an obedient sheep if I look soft. My neck may be cut but cannot be pulled over.60

Erdo˘gan’s last two sentences in italics were incited from Mehmet Akif Ersoy’s poem, ‘Zulmü Alkı¸slayamam [I cannot applaud oppression].’ Ersoy was known as a patriotic poet and the author of the lyrics of the Turkish National Anthem, contributing to the struggle for the foundation of the Republic of Turkey. Erdo˘gan was often inciting Ersoy’s poems in his public speeches since Ersoy represented ‘a symbolic figure that became the voice and breath of the Turkish land against the colonial intellectual’ for him.61 Ersoy’s verses were in perfect accordance with his confrontational strategy against the military-bureaucratic state, and his stress on power to the people. Meanwhile, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the AKP’s presidential nominee, Abdullah Gül, was also contributing to the resilient party image vis-à-vis the repressive actions of the state. During a TV program, 32. Gün, he stated that:

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Is it possible to separate the armed forces of a country from its government? Of course, there can be different points of view. However, Turkey is a country with rule of law and the hierarchy between the institutions is clear. We are bound by the rules… The issue with the e-memorandum is resolved. It is what it is. We now need to be together in opening up Turkey’s horizon. If we follow the analogy of a plane, Turkey has now gained altitude and steers in the right direction. We have opened a new page.62

It is with such public image and media statements that the AKP took part and thrived in the national elections of 2007. The next section explores how this confrontational image of the AKP helped the party own the issue of democracy and received organized support from the liberal intellectuals and the Kurdish nationalist group. 4.2.3

Support from the Kurds and Liberal Intellectuals for the AKP

Following the e-memorandum issued on April 27 and the Constitutional Court decision to render the parliamentary voting on presidential elections invalid on May 1st, the parliament had voted to hold early parliamentary elections on 22 July 2007. The party campaigns that had started on May 4 were held in a substantially polarized atmosphere. In addition to political parties, hundreds of independent candidates competed. A considerable number of these independent candidates were fielded by the pro-Kurdish DTP, which had participated in 2002 as the DEHAP but failed to pass the 10 percent national threshold. In order to bypass this national threshold, it ran only through ‘independent’ candidates in this election. The DTP’s independent candidates had joined an ad hoc alliance with other smaller parties, called ‘1000 hopes’ whose representatives were also running as independent candidates. As discussed above, the AKP emphasized its record of economic improvement and struggle for democracy during the campaigns, but while doing that the international observers found that it blurred the distinction between government, public funds and institutions and the ruling party itself (OSCE/ODIHR 2007, 16). The CHP, having formed an electoral alliance with the center-left DSP based its campaign on the argument that the incumbent government had used its powers to erode the basic principles of the Atatürk republic. The CHP evoked the spirit of the Republican rallies

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which had taken place in May 2007, in defense of the secularist and republican principles of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. As Fig. 4.2 has shown there was a significant shift in the Kurdish votes from the southeast region toward the AKP in 2007 elections. One thing that should be noted with regard to the appeal of the AKP’s democracy discourse over the Kurdish voters is the fact that during the party’s incumbency, the AKP officials had advocated policies parallel to a Kurdish report prepared in 1991 by Recep Tayyip Erdo˘gan who had been the provincial head of the RP in Istanbul (Efegil 2011, 30). The report, according to Efegil (2011) was challenging the traditional opinions among the military elites and state bureaucrats, and for the first time accepted the existence of a Kurdish question and that the Kurdish people suffered from both military operations and the PKK attacks. In the AKP’s first government term (2002 and 2007), there was still no official policy toward the Kurds and the “Kurdish Opening (KO)” was undertaken only during its second term. However, after the 2002 general elections, the AKP officials, at the discursive level, advocated policies parallel to the 1991 report and Prime Minister Erdo˘gan delivered a popular speech whereby his statement ‘the Kurdish issue is my issue (Kürt sorunu benim sorunum)’ was emphasized in national newspaper headlines in August 2005. Yet, the speech did not only include a promise of the resolution of the Kurdish conflict but heavily mirrored Erdo˘gan’s confrontation against a repressive state based on a narrative of victimhood.63 In that speech, he did not for instance hesitate to emphasize the fact that he was a jailed politician in the following words: When I was in prison just because I read a poem, I sent the following message to our nation: I am not offended by my state. This state and this country are ours, and one day their mistakes will be corrected. Yes, I sent this message to you from prison. It is our dream; wherever the flag of this country waves, everyone will be treated as a first-class citizen. It is our dream that the rule of law will not be a guest but a property owner in this country.

Furthermore, at the end of this speech, Erdo˘gan read a poem titled ‘I desire a country (memleket isterim)’ which is based on desiring a country that embraces all people, regardless of their differences.64 In this sense, Erdo˘gan was particularly paying attention to underlining the common

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grievances between the Kurdish and Muslim citizens in his speech when he visited Diyarbakır. I interviewed the local party activists in Diyarbakır representing the AKP and the DTP in 2007 two months after the parliamentary elections, in which the AKP had performed much better than the DTP in the southeastern provinces of Turkey. In their responses regarding the success of their party, the AKP activists both referred to the problem of the existence of a non-neutral Turkish state taking a side in political issues and the AKP’s improvement in living standards, as well as infrastructure development in the region. R15, a prominent local district party activist, for instance, underlined the problem of state intervention in politics: There is still a problem between the politician and the bureaucrat… From time to time, we see that the bureaucrat intervenes in the politician’s job. The bureaucrat gets involves in politics. This is dangerous. When the politician loses the support of the bureaucrat, and when the bureaucrat loses the trust of the citizen, the political situation in Diyarbakır, and in Turkey, would not improve.

When asked about his party’s success in the Kurdish political region in 2007, he further stated that: As of now, two hundred thousand children in our region go to school. Twenty-five thousand community clinics (sa˘glık oca˘gı) have been opened. For 80 years, there were villages, which did not have access to water. Now they do. A 400km-long blacktop was constructed. When it comes to security, there used to be many detentions and arrests. Now, we see much less of these. The locals feel liberated and happier.

Another AKP activist from Diyarbakır, R16 stated that: I used to be a member of the RP and the FP. When the split happened, I chose the AKP because it is the party that can solve the Kurdish question through dialogue, bring freedom to the country and improve economy at the same time.

R17 from the Diyarbakır party organization also stated in 2007 that she had never been a member of a political party earlier and decided to work

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for the AKP because she was impressed by Tayyip Erdo˘gan’s style and vision. She went on to state that: As a party activist, we want to do several things for the people but then the state prohibits our activities. This repressive order needs to end for us to be able to deliver something. I am hopeful for the future of this country.

R18 in 2007, comparing the DTP and the AKP, mentioned that: Most people have a Kurdish origin and people mainly vote for the AKP and the DTP in Diyarbakır. I think, yet, the AKP is destroying the power of the DTP here. In the upcoming local elections, I am sure the AKP will reach a significant number of votes.

When he was asked the reason for this shift, he responded that: The AKP pioneered in the field of health and education. It founded village schools, repaired the school buildings, and provided financial support for school children. There used to be only eight health centers. Now, there is twenty-three.

The responses combining the AKP’s socioeconomic and infrastructural investments in the region with the problem of the existence of a biased military-bureaucratic state show the effect of the AKP’s image as a party that is on its way toward the ideal of serving to the people without falling at the military-bureaucratic hurdle as its predecessors, the RP and the FP did. Having a retrospective look at the impact of the AKP on the Kurdish constituency in 2018, the interviewee, E1 stresses that: The AKP was founded in line with the EU accession process. In doing so, it positioned itself as an anti-system party that could put itself in line with other anti-system parties, particularly the pro-Kurdish parties and politicians.

E9, another HDP activist evaluated the AKP’s appeal to the Kurds back then as follows: The AKP played a game which was not sincere from the beginning. When he came to power in 2002, Erdo˘gan said, “I am your representative” to the Kurdish people and it made an impact on them. There was no politician

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that could make the bold statement of representing of the Kurds earlier. The resolution of the Kurdish issue should yet start from within Diyarbakır, not from above.

E12, referring to the context of the 2007 elections (mainly to the ememorandum issued by the TAF) asserted that: Erdogan is a politician that could effectively use the discourse of peoplehood and victimhood. These discourses have a charming impact. He was seen as someone that could abolish the military tutelage and change the status quo. When we evaluate the way he was reacting from today’s perspective, we see that it was only because of his own interest to remain in power.

From the perspective of E16, there was also only one brief answer for the AKP’s success: The only reason that made the AKP successful among the Kurds was Erdo˘gan’s narrative of grievances and victimhood.

The liberal intellectuals such as Cengiz Çandar and Hasan Cemal were particularly negative about the military-bureaucratic state in the context of the presidential election crisis that shaped the 2007 early parliamentary elections. In their columns in the most popular newspapers of their time, Milliyet and Hürriyet, they were contributing to the public agenda in defense of the AKP in its ‘democratic struggle’ against the militarybureaucratic establishment. Prior to the election, Çandar was testing the waters in Washington DC regarding the expectations of the US government from the Turkish elections. On 22 June 2007, he wrote a column entitled, ‘Turkey in Washington [Washington’daki Türkiye]’ assessing the debates on Turkey in the US capital and how they were a reflection of the debates within Turkey itself. Turkey’s current political conflicts have their facets here as well. Each side in Turkey has a supporter within the “Two Washingtons.” Advisors such as [Dick] Cheney, David Wurmser, some in the Europe Department of the American Ministry of Foreign Affairs and think tanks with a far-right position wish to eliminate the AKP through a “military intervention” in Turkey. On the other hand, the President, the Secretary of

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State, the national security adviser (Stephen Hadley) and the undersecretary (Nicholas Burns) support the motto of “continuing with democracy”, while “not feeling any special sympathy” for the AKP. In the ‘thinktank community’ excluding the far-right think tanks and experts, who are interested in and work on Turkey are also strongly against a ‘military intervention.’

Çandar referred to this distinction between the two Washingtons in his other columns as well. It is important to see that he drew parallels with the think tanks with a far-right ideology in the US with the ideology of the supporters of a military-bureaucratic regime in Turkey, which signaled his observations on the ongoing polarization in the country. On 26 June 2007, he quoted the British prime minister Tony Blair’s farewell speech, which implied that being on ‘the AKP side’ was the right side and the side of democracy. Let’s record certain parts of the article containing Tony Blair’s views on Turkey: …This secular, contemporary European democracy, with a predominantly Muslim population, is the living example of how being modern does not mean being less Muslim; demanding democracy, equality and freedom does not mean rejecting your religion, and in the same way, getting closer to Europe does not mean turning away from Islam.

Çandar then went on to state that, And, how interesting it is, Tony Blair, at the European end of the “Anglo-Saxon axis,” recommends determination to Turkey on the path to European Union, through strengthening its democracy, while on the other leg of this “axis”, a “clique” in Washington preaches for Turkey to abandon its European Union goal, organizes discussions in some of the “institutes” they own, estimating the cancellation of Turkey’s democracy… The ‘introverted,’ ‘nationalist’ circles—as they call it [in Turkey]—some of which are thoroughly anti-democratic and putschist—are nothing more than our inner extensions of the “American extreme right.”

In the next day’s column, on 27 June 2007, Çandar further criticized the main opposition CHP’s call to the AKP to have a compromise on the presidential candidate with the following words:

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Can’t he be chosen through ‘compromise’? A media illusion has been created on the concept of ‘compromise.’ Yet, it has one single and simple meaning: Compromise means Deniz Baykal’s personal selection (or prevention) of the AK Party member who will be the next presidential candidate. On the eve of a general election, can a party with 353 seats in the parliament with 550 seats to accept the situation and call it a “compromise”? Being accused of such “an uncompromising” attitude is only possible in Turkey’s political culture.

After the Constitutional Court announces the detailed ruling on the presidential election process, Çandar wrote a critical note on the Turkish constitution and the court decision in the following words, on 29 June 2007: The Constitutional Court made a ‘political decision,’ and then tried to produce a ‘legal justification’ for this decision, that none of the serious and important legal experts shared. With such a justification, the presidency of Turgut Özal, Süleyman Demirel and the current incumbent President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, can now be considered ‘extrajudicial…’ But what is ‘positive’ about this decision? It is the most striking manifestation for the impossibility of governing Turkey on the basis of the 1982 Constitution. Therefore, a ‘new civil constitution’ has become ‘inevitable.’ Voters have to go to the ballot box with such ‘consciousness’ on July 22, and the one who comes out of the box must come with this ‘consciousness.’

On another column on 12 July 2007, repeating the need for a new constitution, and that the next president should be someone not representing ‘above politics’ but ‘within politics,’ Çandar was stating that: What should Turkey elect a non-political president with no party affiliation? This would mean nothing but being a hostage of the Ankara bureaucracy or the military tutelage. The elections on 22 July must cancel this understanding.

Finally, on 23 July 2007, one day after the election in which the AKP attained almost 47 percent of the votes throughout the country, Çandar wrote a column, including the confirmation that the election was not an ordinary parliamentary election but the victory of a democratic struggle:

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July 22 is the victory of the people of Turkey. July 22 is the victory of the “spirit of civil society”. If what happened between April and July had not happened, if the Presidential elections had taken place in a normal course of events and the elections would be held in November as previously foreseen; The AK Party was expected to receive between 30 and 35 percent of the vote... But we cannot think of the 22 July election independently of the 27 April e-memorandum and the “Republican rallies” that took place in April-May and encouraged polarization in the society. From this perspective, the result of July 22 is a “democratic-civilian memorandum” against the April 27 “e-memorandum” of the Turkish people. It is the rejection of polarization by the people of Turkey.

In his columns within the week ahead of the election, Hasan Cemal was also raising critical remarks on the main opposition, Court decision and the state sabotage that prevented the AKP candidate, Abdullah Gül, from being elected for the Turkish presidency. Even though Cemal continued to stand on a relatively more neutral position regarding the policies of the AKP government (compared to Candar), he had started voicing the AKP’s contribution to Turkish democracy during its incumbency. He underlined the military’s involvement in politics as the main barrier against democratic improvement in Turkey. On 17 July 2007, he stated that the previous coalition governments in the 1990s could not make any amendments on the military constitution (askeri anayasa); yet it was only since the AKP’s single party rule that the country went through significant reforms.65 More specifically, he wrote that: The door of reform in real sense opened as a result of the one-party government rule following the general elections of 3 November 2002. Turkey leaped forward regarding the solution of structural economic problems … I have been following politics for forty years... The political and economic reformism that the single-party government undertook in Ankara and its political determination in certain areas cleared the way for Turkey in the last four years. This is the case even though It has many shortcomings and aspects that can be severely criticized. [In this election] Turkey needs a single party government that can manage the change in Turkey... Which party is it? I do not interfere with it. You will make the final decision on this issue at the ballot box next Sunday.66

Even though Cemal refrained from giving the name of the AKP in this piece, it is clear that he implied the AKP since it was the only candidate

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that could reach a parliamentary majority and form another single-party government in 2007. The very next day on 18 July 2007, Cemal talked about what he called the ‘fear mongers (korku tacirleri)’ in Turkey. He wrote that, since the transition to multi-party democracy in the 1950s, Turkey faced fearmongers, who feared the results of democratic elections. According to Cemal, fearmongers were those that desired to keep certain governmental issues under control, narrow the field of civilian politics and strengthen the power of those appointed, i.e. the military-bureaucratic elites, vis-à-vis the elected.67 He further noted that: They are here to frighten the nation and claim that either Islamic reactionism will emerge out of the ballot box, or that Turkey will be divided. First, there is no reactionism to emerge out of the ballot box. Second, Turkey will not be divided. Third, the only way to challenge reactionism and separatism is the struggle given within democracy… So why this fearmongering? That is because they themselves fear democracy. It is because the public vote makes them nervous. It is because they cannot trust the ballot box. According to the fear-mongers, the main enemy or the real internal enemy is democracy... If July 22 will lead to a result that they do not desire, they can announce it as an anti-democratic development… In this respect, it is striking that the core of the Constitution [drafted by the military on] September 12, was not changed even after a quarter of a century. It is the ’distrust’ against the ballot box and the elected ones. That is what the April 27 Memorandum was for… To summarize: Fearmongering, memorandums and the mentality that perceives democracy as the main internal enemy is straining and polarizing Turkey. If Turkey wants to clear its way, it needs to neutralize this mentality.68

On the election day, July 22, Cemal’s column titled “Sivil Anayasa [Civilian Constitution]” was released in Milliyet . In this piece, he stated that the problem of the constitution of Turkey was Turkey’s problem of the military. He argued that none of the constitutions drafted in Turkish political history in 1960, 1971 and 1980 were civilian constitutions. Repeating that this was a result of the distrust against the elected governments by the military-bureaucratic bloc, he argued that the decision of the Constitutional Court, the e-memorandum issued by the TAF, the position of the current Turkish president and the main opposition CHP

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that allied with these actors were all a reflection of the same, ongoing problem.69 He then concluded with a positive message for the electorate: Are you ready to create a truly democratic constitution, which will be the first civilian production of this country, by cooperating with all political forces including the government and the opposition? It would also mean a democratic or libertarian revolt. Does it sound like a dream? Why shouldn’t it be a dream? You can’t live without dreaming. Happy Sunday, have a good election!70

Hence, even though Cemal was careful not to prize the AKP government, he was clear about supporting an elected government against a militarybureaucratic state. In this sense, the points he made in his columns overlapped with the AKP’s discourse on justice and democracy. Finally, after the election results were clear, he wrote the following statements on 23 July 2007 in a column titled, ‘This is the people’s memorandum [Bu da milletin muhtırası]!’ We see it one more time: The intervention in politics outside of the scope of democracy, such as an e-memorandum issued at midnight by the military, or a politicized rule of law backfired at the ballot box. Is it possible to interpret the massive increase in the AKP votes in another way? Prior to the period of presidential elections and the e-memorandum of April 27, the polls showed that the estimated vote percentage of the AKP was around 33-34 per cent… So, what emerged out of the ballot box? Is it Islamic reactionism? Let’s overcome it. The nation gave a memorandum at the ballot box and called for everyone to give up the undemocratic routes…71

As one can observe in these paragraphs written by Cemal, the AKP’s victory ‘at the ballot box’ through a massive increase in its vote shares, was perceived as the victory of democracy against the undemocratic interventions by a military-bureaucratic state. This was also the interpretation that the AKP elite mainly desired to see in public debates. Table 4.3 summarizes the causal mechanism that turned the 2007 national elections into an opportunity for democratization.

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Table 4.3 The causal mechanism that turned the 2007 elections into an ‘Opportunity for Democratization’ Scope condition

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Outcome

Theory

Discursive opportunity structure (DOS) for the party to confront the state

Moderation theory: The state acts in a repressive way in a setting where parties are included in elections

Issue ownership theory: The party confronts the state and owns the ‘issue of democracy’

The party receives the organized support of diverse social groups during elections

Observable manifestations

Turkey makes progress on EU-related reforms. The Turkish military supports Turkey’s membership to the EU. The EU demands civilianization of the regime

1. The ememorandum issued by the General Staff against the AKP government 2. The Court decision that ruled out the parliamentary voting on presidential elections

The AKP’s opposition against the ememorandum, rhetoric on its successes regarding ‘economic stability and democracy,’ criticism of the ‘injustices’ of the system

Laclau’s theory of populism: Plurality of unsatisfied social demands unite under this issue Liberal intellectuals that care for democracy and economic stability and some Kurdish nationalist groups who have been victims of state repression show sympathy for the AKP

4.3

The AKP receives higher levels of support from the intellectuals and the Kurdish nationalist groups (compared to 2002)

2015 National Elections and the HDP

Following the third electoral victory in 2011, the AKP’s ownership of the issue of democracy quickly faded. Turkey experienced a major dedemocratization, violation of the rule of law, erosion of freedom of expression and political rights during the third AKP incumbency (2011– 2015). Chapter 3 argued that the post-Gezi context, coupled with the

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HDP’s skepticism over the ongoing Kurdish peace process provided a unique discursive opportunity structure for the HDP to confront the rising authoritarian tendency of the AKP government. This section highlights the examples of the authoritarian policies of the AKP government and the way the HDP framed these policies as an issue of democracy, especially during the local and presidential elections of 2014 and months before the 2015 June elections. The public outreach of these frames during the June 2015 national elections was fundamental for the success of the HDP in receiving organized support from diverse groups. 4.3.1

The HDP’s Framing of State Repression (2013–2015)

On 17 December 2013, Prime Minister Erdo˘gan and four prominent ministers in his cabinet faced accusations of bribery as a result of massive anti-corruption operations. The police launched three separate anti-corruption operations and detained 52 people including three sons of the ministers. On 19 December, the daily Taraf published police recordings of telephone conversations and visual monitoring of bribery connections of two AKP ministers.72 The investigations were led by Prosecutor Zekeriya Öz, who had formerly played a significant role in the elimination of the military-bureaucratic state through the 2008 Ergenekon mass trial of former soldiers and civilians accused of devising a coup. Erdo˘gan accused the representatives of the Gülen movement, a religious civil society network, in the police and judiciary for establishing a ‘parallel state (paralel devlet )’ and initiated a massive anti-Gülenist purge in state institutions. Hundreds of police officers, judges and public prosecutors were relocated or dismissed while pro-Gülen media outlets such ˙ as Zaman, Samanyolu and Koza Ipek Group were seized by the government a year later (Ta¸s 2018, 399). The local elections on 30 March 2014 were held in the aftermath of this corruption scandal, which took place only a few months after the Gezi protests. According to Öni¸s, the opposition expected the AKP to go through a major defeat in the local elections as a result of the increasingly negative image of the AKP starting with the Gezi Park protests in May–June 2013, continuing with the serious allegations of corruption involving the Prime Minister and other leading government figures in December 2013 and the rising tension between the AKP the representatives of the Gülen Movement. Even though the party’s performance did not heavily decline in the 2014 local elections

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(with a rate of 43 popularity as opposed to 50 percent in 2011), the repressive policies of the AKP started being framed as an issue of democracy, by the BDP, the HDP and the ESP. The HDP back then represented the western wing of the pro-Kurdish BDP while the ESP was a socialist party in alliance with the BDP. Most notably the BDP co-chair, Selahattin Demirta¸s made several public statements with regard to the autocratization trend in Turkey and blamed particularly Prime Minister Erdo˘gan. In a public rally in Dersim/Tunceli, he appealed to Turkey’s largest religious minority, the Alevis in the following way: We will change the political order that shapes the current state and municipal administration. We will establish a mechanism in which people take active part in the decision-making processes. When the Prime Minister hears this, he gets goose bumps, since he is so used to ruling as one-man and the sultan. The word ‘democracy’ bothers him and as soon as hears it, he starts itching. He says, ‘I will make all the decisions’ as he is accustomed to being the one-man. This is the reason why the country is in this situation. He is alone and ruling a country with a population of 77 million people. Maybe he will be successful, but neither his mind nor his capacity is enough for it. One messes things up when he makes the decisions on his own. He consults Bilal once in a while, but he is worse than him [Erdo˘gan].73

In the same speech, Demirta¸s also labeled the upcoming local Election Day (30 March) as the day to hold the government accountable for the children who were killed during Gezi protests. Referring to the Alevi identity of Berkin Elvan, one of the victims of police repression during the protests, he made the following statements: March 30 is the day to defend that spirit, from the Gezi resistance to the Amed and Lice resistance, and to hold those accountable for the children who were murdered. The way to make those who murdered Berkin Elvan accountable is to reset their killers. Not a single vote should go from Dersim to the AKP. The Dersim resident is aware of this. The Prime Minister had said, ‘his face was covered, how would the police know that he was a child?’ The police did not understand it was a child since his face was covered, but they knew the Alevi children one by one in that crowd, they shot the Alevi children one by one. Is this a coincidence? No, they consciously targeted the Alevi youth and the Alevi children.74

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As the above statement shows, Demirta¸s did not hesitate to make an association between the Gezi movement and the repression of the Alevi identity in Turkey and asked for the Alevi vote in Dersim. With regard to the AKP–Gülen conflict, Demirta¸s also noted that the democratic erosion in the country was the responsibility of the AKP government, not the ‘parallel state’ as claimed by the Prime Minister Erdo˘gan. The imprisonment of the journalists, pressures on the publishers and threats to the media owners to silence critical reporters happened under the official authority of the AKP government, according to Demirta¸s. Referring to the large-scale KCK (Koma Civaken Kurdistan— Kurdistan Communities Union) operations under the auspices of the anti-terror law targeting Kurdish activists, Demirta¸s further stated that: These operations were part of the official policy of the AKP, and they did it together [with the Gülenists]. The Prime Minister openly supported these operations, using all the means at his disposal, with the MIT (Millî ˙ Istihbarat Te¸skilatı – National Intelligence Organization), with the security forces and all the means available to the Ministry of Justice. We do not know whether the people who initiated these operations were sympathetic to the [Gülen] community. It does not concern us. In the past, the AKP was responsible for these antidemocratic measures. There is no point in putting the blame on the [Gülen] community now.75

Indeed, the anti-KCK trials and arrests including Kurdish elected politicians, such as the mayors from the BDP, leaders of civil society organizations, human rights advocates, and journalists had met reaction in society (Kemahlıo˘glu 2015). In one of his speeches, Demirta¸s had also stressed that when leaders encountered corruption allegations, they usually had to choose either to democratize or autocratize the regime: ‘Right now, the path that the AKP follows is the same path that Assad or Saddam has followed. When the facts come into sight, he [Erdo˘gan] escalates the level of pressure. He should have rather worked on increasing transparency against corruption allegations.’ Stating that Erdogan’s government led the country to disaster so that he could save himself, Demirta¸s further said, ‘Do they think these people are stupid? He undervalues the people but speaks of national sovereignty on the microphones. Can such a government see the year 2023 with such an approach? It can hardly see the end of 2014. Good luck to them.’76

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It has previously been argued that Demirta¸s’s direct confrontation against Erdo˘gan played a decisive role in his rising popularity (Celep 2018). This confrontation became even more popular during the popular presidential elections that were held on August 10 of the same year. This was the first popular presidential election that Turkey was experiencing under civilian rule. Along with two presidential candidates, the Prime ˙ Minister Erdo˘gan himself on the AKP ticket and Ekmeleddin Ihsano˘ glu on the joint MHP-CHP ticket, Selahattin Demirtas ran as a presidential candidate in this election, representing the HDP (which had now officially become the successor of the BDP). It was in this election that the HDP—for the first time—campaigned on behalf of ‘all the peoples’ of Turkey, including the Turks, Kurds, women, LGBTQs, immigrants and all others who considered themselves discriminated by the country’s rightwing political establishment (HDP 2015). The party presented itself to the general public in Turkish, Kurdish and English languages with the following words: We the democratic and peaceful forces of Turkey; representatives of labor, ecology and women’s rights associations, artists, writers, intellectuals, independent individuals, workers, representatives of different ethnic and religious groups, the unemployed, the retired, farmers, the handicapped, scientists and those whose cities are being destroyed have united here. Our organization starts from the streets and develops into local assemblies in our neighborhoods. (HDP 2015)

˙ Indeed, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the presidential candidate of the CHPMHP coalition, also came from a conservative-religious background even though his high intellectual profile stood in contrast to the folkloric religious culture of the masses that Erdo˘gan could appeal (Kalaycıo˘glu 2015, 163). Amidst this competition between two main conservative candidates, Demirta¸s stood out with a campaign emphasizing the rights of the workers, ethnic groups, non-Muslims and non-Sunni Muslims. In this election, Demirta¸s achieved 9.8 percent of the national vote, which was considered as a huge success given that the pro-Kurdish parties had never achieved more than 6–7 percent of the votes in previous parliamentary elections. This was also a signal that the HDP was becoming particularly popular under the leadership of Demirta¸s utilizing a discourse heavily confronting the AKP government and prime minister Erdogan, emphasizing the need for a countrywide democratic struggle, just 10 months

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ahead of the general elections of 7 June 2015. For sure, the Kurdish vote continued to be important for the HDP, however the way ‘the Kurds’ were framed in the campaign discourse was much more related with the rights of the ‘all discriminated peoples’ of Turkey. For instance, Demirta¸s framed his own Kurdish identity in the following way vis-à-vis the critics: A Kurd comes out; a Kurd that comes out of the Kurdish political struggle, a real Kurdish presidential candidate… They cannot believe it. They make nothing out of it. They do not understand that a Kurd can come out and defend the rights of the Turks. They do not understand that a Kurd can come out and defend the rights of all workers, women, Alevis, Armenians, farmers, peasants and artisans. They have not seen something like this in the past. A Kurd can come out and defend the rights of both Muslims and Jews at the same time but they can never accept it even if it were a dream. This is why they panick and why they are bewildered. They desire that he [the Kurdish presidential candidate] defend his own identity when he comes out. They are used to seeing that when one comes out to the political arena, he defends only those that are on his side. They want to declare war against the rest and to crush the rest. This is how politics has been shaped for years.77

Three main issues dominated the electoral campaigns and public debates during the 2015 national elections: Fears about the AKP’s turn toward authoritarianism, its economic performance and the competition for the Kurdish vote (Kemahlıo˘glu 2015). While the AKP proposed to change the constitution and introduce a presidential system in order to bring effective governance and democracy to Turkey, the opposition parties feared that it would further increase the authoritarian tendencies of the AKP. Among the opposition party leaders, Demirta¸s’s fiery speech entitled “Seni ba¸skan yaptırmayaca˘gız (We shall not make you president), left a mark on the entire campaign process. In this speech, Demirta¸s once again directly addressed Erdo˘gan and made the following statements: I would like to share one single message with Turkey. We are not a bargaining party. We are not in any dirty bargains with the AKP. Dear Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as long as the HDP exists, you will be not be a president. As long as the HDP members exist on these lands, we will not make you president.78

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On different occasions, he also did not hesitate to underline the unfair conditions of the electoral process. He further looked competent and confident that the HDP will overcome the 10 percent national threshold and stop the authoritarian policies of the AKP: It will be a relief when a party with such a high support rate and one that strives for peace and brotherhood enters the parliament. Turkey will take a sigh of relief once we curb an understanding that prepares itself for dictatorship… Imagine a president, who is organizing a rally using citizens’ money to keep our party out of the parliament. The president is campaigning against us based on his official and unofficial budget, bureaucracy, lies and slander. He is working to keep HDP under the 10 per cent national threshold via using 600 TV channels. But by the evening of June 7, it will be us who will have defeated them all.79

It should also be noted that the election campaigns in 2015 reflected the spirit of Gezi protests and the HDP was considered the main representative of the demands of the Gezi protesters. On the second anniversary of the protests on 31 May 2015, a civic umbrella organization called Taksim Solidarity (Taksim Dayanı¸sması), which was founded to preserve the resistance spirit, organized a commemoration for the victims of the movement and the HDP’s Istanbul branch took part in it.80 As an extension of the Gezi resistance, a civic initiative called ‘Vote for the HDP if you want to breathe’ was established. The young activists working for the initiative argued that their main goal was to create ‘spaces to breathe’ after the Gezi movement since the power of the AKP government was more and more ‘holding their breath’ (meaning ‘constraining their freedom’) every day. For these activists, the HDP corresponded to the space where they could breathe because it was the only party that could be influential in preventing the presidential system in Turkey.81 In addition to making the fiery criticisms of Erdo˘gan and a presidential system advocated by the AKP, the HDP co-chair Demirta¸s, was also making statements connecting the problems of democracy in Turkey to the discrimination against women. Combatting gender inequality was already an important part of the HDP (2015) party program but the HDP also contributed to the visibility of this issue in its unique co-chair system. According to this system, the party is chaired both by a man and

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a woman at the national, provincial and district levels. In this sense, Burç (2019), for instance, argues that the HDP was an attempt at circumventing authoritarian statism in Turkey because it was constructed jointly with an autonomous women’s body and its narrative was challenging the state’s hegemony based on one nation, one flag, one language and male dominance. In the 2015 June elections, there were not only a total of 268 female candidates in the HDP list but also a feminist election manifesto presented to the media by the party co-chair, Figen Yüksekda˘g.82 Demirta¸s further stated: The number of female candidates in our party list is higher than the number of female candidates in the lists of other three parties... This is another reflection of discrimination against women. The other lists show that no party has given up its monistic approach [to gender]. There is no other party than the HDP that represents Turkey… President Erdo˘gan has the weight over the creation of the AKP’s list of candidates, which is nothing but a colorless and dull list. There is a leak in the AKP’s ship and it is about to sink.83

All in all, in the post-Gezi period, the BDP-HDP’s public image was offering an alternative vision of radical democracy arguing for minority rights and checks on a centralized state (Kaya and Whiting 2019). The party co-chair, Demirta¸s, did not hesitate to target Erdo˘gan (first as prime minister and then as a popularly elected president) in his media statements and confidently underline the autocratic practices of his government. The consistent framing of the AKP government as a repressive apparatus and a rights-based discourse had a significant in the post-Gezi period and helped the party to own the issue of democracy during the 2015 elections. The next section shows the interview evidence in terms of how and why different groups decided to join forces with the HDP in this election. 4.3.2

Support from the Socialist, Feminist and Environmental Groups

In the summer of 2018, I interviewed the HDP activists on the question of how their party, passing the 10 percent national threshold, obtaining 13 percent of the votes and winning 80 out of 550 seats in the parliament, outperformed the expectations in the 2015 June elections. As the Appendix of this study shows, among the respondents were not only the

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activists from the Kurdish movement but also the human rights advocates, feminist, socialist and environmental activists. For instance, E8 stated that: I come from the socialist movement. I resigned from the DSIP [Revolutionary Socialist Workers’ Party] and decided to join the HDP to join the peoples’ struggle under one roof. I was convinced that the HDP includes not only the struggle of the Kurdish people, but everyone who is marginalized in Turkey. There are also marginalized Turks. The women are also marginalized. I am a Zaza-Alevi and do not know my language.

E4, who joined the HDP as an environmental activist, explained the HDP success in the following words: The real turning point of success was when Demirta¸s stated, in the run-up to the 7 June 2015 elections, “We will not make you the president.” The government came to increase its polarizing rhetoric and tactics, but the HDP did not give up. Even when the provinces in the southeast of Turkey were bombed during the HDP, HDP did not give up.

Indeed, two days before the national elections in June 2015, the HDP rally in Diyarbakır had been bombed, killing 4 and injuring 400 people. In the media, it was written that the supporters of the party felt more emboldened after this incident. As an environmental activist, it is important to note what E4 understands from the HDP: HDP has three core features that allow people to enter or support the party. First, it represents equality. Second, it represents freedom. Third, it represents democracy. By positioning its beliefs as such, the HDP has been able to function as an intervening mediator in the conflict in the southeast. But now, there is not even an actual party anymore. It is all just activists working together for these three causes.

On the question of what made the HDP different from its predecessors or other Kurdish parties, another activist, E5 underlined that: Previous Kurdish parties were also inclusive, but what really made the HDP different from the previous ones was its encompassment of diverse political movements, not just the Kurds. The idea was that different cultures could live together, so it is not primarily a Kurdish party but one provoked by the state. It is a party protecting anyone subjected to illegitimate action… The

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HDP was able to use the experience of the Kurdish political movement under a strong state oppression and terror and present itself as a party of the repressed. No other groups were repressed like the Kurds before so it was a rational choice to start such a movement out of the Kurdish experience.

E7, a human rights activist and a HDP deputy, explained that the party’s success in June 2015 election was the direct outcome of the AKP’s increasing authoritarianism, which had different reflections at the national level and in the southeast of Turkey. While it was reflected in the repression of the Gezi protests and intimidation of government opponents at the national level throughout 2013–2014, within southeastern Turkey, it was reflected in the AKP’s inconsistent attitude toward the peace process and its irreconcilable position on the Kobanî events in 2014. Kobanî was the central one of three de facto autonomous cantons in northern Syria under the control of the PYD, a Kurdish political party from Northern Syria, having close ties with the PKK. However in September 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). launched a siege on the canton which had a deep emotional impact on the Kurdish activists within Turkey (Gerim 2020). The HDP demanded the AKP government to provide military aid and support corridor at the Turkish border but the government was reluctant to take such direct actions since it recognized the PYD as a terrorist group. What started as small-scale street protests in southeastern Turkey exacerbated after the HDP co-chairs, Selahattin Demirta¸s and Figen Yüksekda˘g, made an urgent call for demonstrations in solidarity with Kobanî. The demonstrations turned violent when the protesters clashed with the police. Between the dates 7–12 October, there were 46 casualties, 682 injured and 323 arrested.84 Hence, in his definition of the AKP’s authoritarianism, the respondent E7, included a southeastern dimension, which, from the viewpoint of the Kurdish activists, is equally important as the AKP’s policies to silence dissidents, detain and arrest journalists at the national level. According to E12, one of the HDP’s prominent provincial activists, the party was perceived as the only antidote to the AKP authoritarianism and this was reflected in the outcome of the June 2015 elections. The AKP had turned into a governing party that aimed to safeguard the political system it constructed. It turned into a party of the state, just like the Kemalist parties did in the past. The opposition was stuck and

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there was not much enough room for maneuver… The HDP, in line with the ongoing peace process, made the demands of democracy, freedom of expression, empowerment of local governments explicit. It was against a presidential system.

E16, a Kurdish feminist HDP activist from Diyarbakır, further explained how the HDP joined forces with other social groups: We met with Turkish feminists in metropolitan cities. Throughout our journey in 2007 under the umbrella of “1000 hopes”, in the joint platforms we founded in 2011 elections, we constructed candidate lists not only including Kurds, but also Armenians, Assyrians, Arabs. We moved on slowly and confidently, earning the trust of other groups. The HDP did not emerge all of a sudden but as the consequence of a long-term conscious effort, earning and accumulating the trust of other groups.

Even though E16’s response does not particularly refer to the HDP’s confrontation against the rising authoritarianism in the country, another respondent, E13, below, explained how this pluralistic approach toward identity politics was considered as a prescription against the AKP government policies: The HDP was different from its predecessors in many aspects that made it more appealing to other groups than the Kurds. For sure, there was a call for democratization among all Kurdish parties in the past but the HDP opened up identity politics to an extent, making it explicit that different communities needed to be democratized as well, not just the Kurdish community. There are the Arabs, Turkmens, Kurds, women, LGBTQs, revolutionary socialists. The HDP was a reflection of this change. The HDP approach stands in sharp contrast to the extremely centralized and exclusivist approach of the AKP government. The HDP struggles against this by pushing for the autonomy of different localities. If I had to name this struggle, I would call it struggle for “local democracy.”

Finally, E19, another environmental activist and a member of the GreenLeft Party working within the HDP explained the success in the following words: The state was going through a transformation led by the AKP rule. The military tutelage was coming to an end and building its own authoritarian system. Not only the Kurdish movement but all leftist parties had

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to change and offer something more convincing to the people. The HDP was the first party to propose a new form of living in Turkey. That was what Selahattin Demirta¸s’s presidential campaign in 2014 and the party campaign in 2015 elections were about.

4.4

Summary

This chapter has empirically demonstrated how the AKP in 2002 and 2007 national elections and the HDP in June 2015 national elections were able to appeal to different social groups by owning the issue of democracy under rising authoritarianism and repressive acts of the state establishment. In the case of 2002 and 2007 elections, the AKP turned out to appeal more to the Kurds and liberal intellectuals by a giving the image of a determinant party struggling for justice, democracy and rule of law; publicly criticizing the decisions of the Constitutional Court and military interventions. The Kurds who had considered the militarybureaucratic state as a threat to their political and cultural rights were enchanted by Erdo˘gan’s confident and competent image as a leader, who was once a ‘victim’ just like themselves. As opposed to the literature, which mainly discusses the religious or ethnic factors in linking Kurdish support to the AKP, the evidence from the interviews in this chapter shows the importance of the AKP’s competent image to deal with a repressive state in appealing to the Kurds. This chapter also demonstrated that the liberal intellectuals, through the examples of Hasan Cemal and Cengiz Çandar, likewise considered the military-bureaucratic state as the main barrier against Turkey’s democratization, integration into the EU and alliance with Western governments and stood closer to the position of the AKP, in 2002 and 2007 elections. The interests of two different groups merged turned into one totality, manifested in the image of the AKP (or even at times the leadership of Tayyip Erdo˘gan), as Laclau’s theory of populism suggests. With regard to the case of the HDP, we observe that the party ideology was already in the making, representing the idea of a joint struggle for different identities prior to the escalating authoritarianism in the country. Yet, when the HDP leadership started directly confronting the AKP’s authoritarian and exclusivist policies between 2013 and 2015, the ideological position that the HDP was representing became more legitimate and popular. At least, this is what the media and interview evidence demonstrates in this chapter. Diversity of groups, not only the Kurds, but

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also the women activists, environmentalists, leftists were convinced to join forces and continue their struggle under one HDP umbrella. The HDP turned into a manifestation of a totality representing different demands and interests. Table 4.4 summarizes the causal mechanism that turned the 2015-June elections into an opportunity for democratization. To sum up, this chapter has evidenced the causal mechanism of how a formerly ethnic or religious party reaches out to different groups and thrives in elections in the following order: (1) state repression, (2) ownership of the issue of democracy, and (3) emergence of a popular totality Table 4.4 The causal mechanism that turned the 2015 June elections into an ‘Opportunity for Democratization’ Scope condition

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Outcome

Theory

Discursive opportunity structure (DOS) for the party to confront the state

Issue ownership theory: The party confronts the state and owns the ‘issue of democracy’

Laclau’s theory of populism: Plurality of unsatisfied social demands unite under this issue

The party receives the organized support of diverse social groups during elections

Observable Manifestations

The Gezi Park protests provide a discursive opportunity structure to publicly criticize some visible authoritarian policies of the AKP government

Moderation theory: The state acts in a repressive way in a setting where parties are included in elections The AKP government uses force against the opposition groups, mainly, the Gezi protesters, minorities, Kurdish party activists, journalists that are critical of the AKP

The HDP co-chair Selahattin Demirta¸s starts referring to the victims of the AKP repression within the same discourse of democracy; draws parallels between Erdo˘gan and the autocrats in the Middle East

The left-wing groups and parties, ecology and feminist movements show sympathy for the HDP and its anti-Erdogan discourse

The HDP receives the support from the left-wing, feminist and ecology movements

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under the banner of one party. The process that links the second stage to the third one is similar to what Guiler (2021, 177) has recently argued in her discussion of the concept of victimhood: ‘Victimhood functions as an affective anchor that transcends the simple boundaries of identity politics, bonding individuals with shared feelings, attitudes, and memories.’ That been said, the next and concluding chapter will emphasize a significant difference between the HDP and the AKP in terms of their party goals (with regard to the years 2002 and 2007 for the AKP and the year 2015 for the HDP). Despite the similar processes the two parties went through in initiating a discourse of democracy against a repressive state, the AKP’s pragmatism (i.e. office-seeking behavior) in doing that was evident while the HDP’s struggle at the national level was more ideological (policy-oriented).

Notes 1. Birand, M. Ali ‘Hepinize kızgınız ve hepinizi suçluyoruz,’ Milliyet, 27 October 2001. https://www.milliyet.com.tr/yazarlar/mehmet-ali-bir and/hepinize-kizginiz-ve-hepinizi-sucluyoruz-5272278 (accessed 8 June 2021). 2. The SP was indeed presented as a party dominated by Necmettin Erbakan’s vision and successor of the FP in public media. See ‘Milli Görü¸s (5): Saadet,’ in Milliyet, 21 July 2001, p. 16. 3. See the discussion by Bolleyer (2013, 39–40). For the original definition of the concept of entrepreneurial party, check also Harmel and Svasand (1993). 4. “Turistlere Refah Bayra˘gı,” Milliyet, 2 April 2004, p. 6. 5. “Erdo˘gan’ın Gövde Gösterisi,” Milliyet, 23 April 1998, p. 18. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. “Liderli˘ge Engel,” Hürriyet, April 22, 1998. 10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-J6MZMaM9c. 11. “Ecevit’in Merve Ricası,” Hürriyet, April 4, 1999. 12. “Töreye Uyun,” Hürriyet, 12 May 2000. 13. “Erbakan’a Kongre Soku,” ¸ Hürriyet, 15 May 2000. 14. “Aday Olamaz,” Milliyet, 1 September 2002, p. 1. 15. “DGM’nin Kararı Geçersizdir,” Milliyet, 11 September 2002, p. 1. 16. “Demokrasi Yara Aldı,” Milliyet, 17 September 2002, p. 1. 17. “YSK kararını verdi: Aday olamaz,” Milliyet, 21 September 2002, p. 1. 18. “Mücadelemiz devam edecek,” Milliyet, 21 September 2002, p. 18.

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19. This is how Ersoy and Üstüner (2016, 411) define the ‘new elite’ following the rise of the AKP, referring to Rifat Bali’s (2002) definition of the ‘new elite’ in the post-1980 context of Turkey. On the acquaintances of Çandar and Cemal with the European and American intelligentsia, it should be noted Çandar had been a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a Senior Fellow at The United States Institute of Peace between 1999 and 2000. See his profile at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, https://www.ui.se/english/ about/staff/cengiz-candar/, accessed 20 September 2021. Cemal, on the other hand, was known as one of Turkey’s leading journalists in European circles, having taken prominent roles in popular newspapers before serving as a columnist in Milliyet. He served as the editor-in-chief of Cumhuriyet and wrote on the first page of Sabah. Furthermore, he interviewed several members of the PKK leadership and together with Çandar took active role in de-securitizing the Kurdish issue via publicly discussing this issue in their columns. In this sense, their fame was internationalized. 20. Cengiz Çandar, “Ak Partili Süreç,” Yeni S¸ afak, 16 August 2001, https:// www.yenisafak.com/yazarlar/cengiz-candar/ak-partili-surec-2028185. 21. This public interview with Cengiz Çandar can be found in “Turkey: The Nation,” C-SPAN, 1 November 2002. https://www.c-span.org/video/? 173599-1/turkey-nation, accessed 21 September 2021. 22. Hasan Cemal, “Washington ve New York’tan Türkiye’ye bakmak!” Milliyet, 10 September 2002, p. 19. 23. Hassan Cemal, “ABD’de Tayyip ile ilgili soru i¸saretleri!” Milliyet, 17 September 2002, p. 17. 24. Hasan Cemal, “3 Kasım’da liderlik bo¸slu˘gu dolacak mı?” Milliyet, 19 September 2002, p. 19. 25. Ibid. 26. Hasan Cemal, “Tayyip Erdo˘gan’la i¸sin püf noktası,” Milliyet, 26 October 2002, p. 19. 27. Hasan Cemal, “Siyaset yasakları istikrara yatırım de˘gil,” Milliyet, 24 September 2002, p. 19. 28. “Cumhurba¸skanı Sezer’den sert veda,” Milliyet, 14 April 2007, p. 1. 29. “AKP uzla¸slatı: Gül Kö¸ske,” Milliyet, 25 April 2007, p. 1. 30. “CHP liderinden Gül’e destek yok”, Milliyet, 25 April 2007, p. 1. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. “Turkey grapples with constitutional crisis surrounding presidential vote” refworld, 27 April 2007, https://www.refworld.org/docid/46ef87a2c. html. 34. Milliyet, 27 April 2007, p. 1. 35. “Hundreds of thousands rally against Turkish government,” Reuters, 14 April 2007, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-presidencyprotest-idUSL1445102820070414.

158 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65.

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“Genelkurmay’dan sert açıklama,” Milliyet, 28 April 2007, p. 1. “Gerekti˘ginde Tavır Koyarız,” Milliyet, 28 April 2007, p. 24. “AB ve ABD’den Ele¸stiri Geldi,” Milliyet, 29 April 2007, p. 1. “CHP: Bu bir muhtıradır,” Milliyet, 28 April 2007, p. 24. “Hükümetten sert yanıt,” Milliyet, 29 April 2007, p. 1. “Hükümetten geri adım yok,” Hürriyet, 29 April 2007, p. 22. “Anayasal sürece devam,” Hürriyet, 29 April 2007, p. 22. Ibid. “Erdo˘gan’dan Büyükanıt’a yanıt: Üzüldüm,” Milliyet, 29 April 2007, p. 20. “Erdo˘gan: Tarih affetmez,” Milliyet, 29 April 2007, p. 22. “Court rules Turkish poll invalid,” Al Jazeeria, 2 May 2007. https:// www.aljazeera.com/news/2007/5/2/court-rules-turkish-poll-invalid-3. ˙ dedi, hükümet yanıt verdi,” Milliyet, 2 May “Anayasa Mahkemesi Iptal 2007, p. 1. Ibid. “Hemen seçim kararı,” Milliyet, 2 May 2007, p. 21. Milliyet, 8 May 2007, p. 1. Milliyet, 26 May 2007, p. 1. Milliyet, 2 June 2007, p. 1. Milliyet, 6 June 2007, p. 1. Milliyet, 19 June 2007, p. 1. Milliyet, 6 July 2007, p. 1. Milliyet, 7 July 2007, p. 20. Ibid. Milliyet, 16 July 2007, p. 12. Milliyet, 17 July 2007, p. 16. Milliyet, 15 July 2007, p. 20. This is the way, Erdo˘gan, as the president of Turkey, described Mehmet Akif Ersoy in March 2021 during the 100th anniversary commemora˙ tion of the Turkish National Anthem. See Yeni Safak, ¸ “Istiklal Mar¸sı milletimizle birlikte tüm mazlumların özgürlük mücadelesine ilham kayna˘gı oldu,” 11 March 2021. https://www.yenisafak.com/hayat/cum hurbaskani-erdogan-mehmet-akif-ersoyu-anma-programinda-konustu-ist iklal-marsi-milletimizle-birlikte-tum-mazlumlarin-ozgurluk-mucadelesineilham-kaynagi-oldu-3603289. Milliyet, 20 July 2007, p. 20. Grigoriadis and Dilek (2018) similarly find that the AKP utilized the narrative of victimhood during the 2011 and 2015 national elections. http://bianet.org/bianet/siyaset/65194-erdogan-kurt-sorunu-hepimi zin-sorunu. Hasan Cemal, “22 Temmuz sonrasi nasil bir Turkiye? (1): Koalisyon degil, tek parti hukumeti,” Milliyet, 17 July 2007.

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66. Ibid. 67. Hasan Cemal, “22 Temmuz sonrasi nasil bir Turkiye? (2): Kavga eden degil, yumusayan Turkiye,” Milliyet, 18 July 2007. 68. Ibid. 69. Hasan Cemal, “22 Temmuz sonrasi nasil bir Turkiye? (6): Sivil Anayasa!” Milliyet, 22 July 2007. 70. Ibid. 71. Hasan Cemal, “Bu da milletin muhtirasi!” Milliyet, 23 July 2007. 72. https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2013/12/corruption-crackd own-damages-akp.html. 73. “Demirta¸s: Gezi Olaylarında Öldürülen Çocukların Alevi Olması Tesadüf Mü?” Haberler.com, 27 March 2014, https://www.haberler.com/dem irtas-gezi-olaylarinda-oldurulen-cocuklarin-5837228-haberi/. 74. Ibid. 75. “Demirta¸s: AKP Ergenekon’un ipine sarıldı,” Evrensel, 30 January 2014, https://www.evrensel.net/haber/77392/demirtas-akp-ergenekonunipine-sarildi. 76. “BDP: AKP Saddam’ın, Esed’in Izledi˘gi Yolu Izliyor,” SonDevir, 28 January 2014, https://sondevir.gaste24.com/arsiv/bdp-akp-saddaminesedin-izledigi-yolu-izliyor-h167221.html. 77. “Demirta¸s’tan Erdo˘gan’a: Tek bir s¸ ey istiyorum senden…” Cumhuriyet, 22 July 2014, https://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/haber/demirtastan-erd ogana-tek-bir-sey-istiyorum-senden-97625. 78. “Demirta¸s, tarihin en kısa grup toplantısını yaptı!” T24, 17 March 2015, https://t24.com.tr/haber/demirtas-hdp-grup-partisini-tek-cumleyle-bit irdi,290709. 79. “Demirta¸s: Bir daha balkon yüzü göremeyeceksin,” Cumhuriyet, 15 May 2015, https://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/haber/demirtas-bir-daha-balkonyuzu-goremeyeceksin-275993. 80. “Gezi Direni¸si Ikinci Yılında Anıldı: Her Yerdeyiz,” MMO.ORG.TR, https://mmo.org.tr/istanbul/haber/gezi-direnisi-2-yilinda-anildi-her-yer deyiz. 81. “10dan sonra bize yeni alanlar açılacak,” Evrensel, 22 May 2015, https:// www.evrensel.net/haber/113361/10dan-sonra-bize-yeni-alanlar-acilacak. 82. “HDP Kadın Seçim Bildirgesini açıkladı,” AA, 22 April 2015, https:// www.aa.com.tr/tr/politika/hdp-kadin-secim-bildirgesini-acikladi/54865. 83. “HDP dı¸sında Türkiye partisi yok,” HDP.ORG.TR, 8 April 2015, https://hdp.org.tr/tr/demirtas-dp-disinda-turkiye-partisi-yok/5999/. ˙ Kobani Eylemleri Raporu: 46 Ki¸si Öldü, 682 Ki¸si Yaralandı, 84. “IHD’den 323 Ki¸si Tutuklandı,” Ba¸skahaber, 14 October 2014, http://www.baskah aber.org/2014/10/ihdden-kobani-eylemleri-raporu-46-kisi.html.

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Nugent, Elizabeth R. 2020. “The Psychology of Repression and Polarization.” World Politics 72 (2): 291–334. Öni¸s, Ziya, and E. Fuat Keyman. 2003. “Turkey at the Polls: A New Path Emerges.” Journal of Democracy 14 (2): 95–107. ¸ Yilmaz. 2009. “Between Europeanization and EuroÖni¸s, Ziya, and Suhnaz Asianism: Foreign Policy Activism in Turkey during the AKP Era.” Turkish Studies 10 (1): 7–24. OSCE/ODIHR. 2007. “Turkey, Early Parliamentary Elections, 22 July 2007: Final Report.” https://www.osce.org/files/f/documents/4/b/29180.pdf. Petrocik, John R. 1996. “Issue Ownership in Presidential Elections, with a 1980 Case Study.” American Journal of Political Science 40 (3): 825–50. Polat, Rabia Karakaya. 2009. “The 2007 Parliamentary Elections in Turkey: Between Securitisation and Desecuritisation.” Parliamentary Affairs 62 (1): 129–48. Sakallio˘glu, Ümit Cizre. 1996. “Parameters and Strategies of Islam–State Interaction in Republican Turkey.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 28 (2): 231–51. Sarigil, Zeki. 2018. Ethnic Boundaries in Turkish Politics: The Secular Kurdish Movement and Islam. New York: New York University Press. Sayarı, Sabri. 2002. “The Changing Party System.” In Politics, Parties, and Elections in Turkey, edited by Yılmaz Esmer and Sabri Sayarı, 9–32. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Sayari, Sabri. 2007. “Towards a New Turkish Party System?” Turkish Studies 8 (2): 197–210. Shambayati, Hootan. 2004. “A Tale of Two Mayors: Courts and Politics in Iran and Turkey.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 36 (2): 253–75. Soyaltın, Di˘gdem. 2017. Europeanisation, Good Governance, and Corruption in the Public Sector: The Case of Turkey. London: Routledge. Ta¸s, Hakkı. 2018. “A History of Turkey’s AKP-Gülen Conflict.” Mediterranean Politics 23 (3): 395–402. Tepe, Sultan. 2012. “Moderation of Religious Parties: Electoral Constraints, Ideological Commitments, and the Democratic Capacities of Religious Parties in Israel and Turkey.” Political Research Quarterly 65 (3): 467–85. Tezcür, Güne¸s Murat. 2010. “When Democratization Radicalizes: The Kurdish Nationalist Movement in Turkey.” Journal of Peace Research 47 (6): 775–89. Walgrave, Stefaan, Jonas Lefevere, and Anke Tresch. 2012. “The Associative Dimension of Issue Ownership.” Public Opinion Quarterly 76 (4): 771–82. Yadirgi, Veli. 2017. The Political Economy of the Kurds of Turkey: The Political Economy of the Kurds of Turkey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yavuz, M. Hakan, and Nihat Ali Özcan. 2006. “The Kurdish Question and Turkey’s Justice and Development Party.” Middle East Policy 13 (1): 102–19. Yeˇgen, Mesut. 2011. “The Kurdish Issue in Turkey: Denial to Recognition.” In Nationalisms and Politics in Turkey: Political Islam, Kemalism and the Kurdish Issue, 67–84. London and New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 5

Conclusion: Consequences on Regime Change

This concluding chapter aims to shed light on the pivotal question of why the religious and ethnic successor parties—and the organized support they received from different social groups against the autocratic tendencies of the Turkish state did not end up with democratization, but on the contrary, further autocratized the regime. The AKP challenged the military-bureaucratic establishment through gaining the support of the liberals and the Kurds in 2002 and 2007 elections. Similarly, the HDP gained the support of different marginalized groups such as the socialists, feminists, LGBTQs, environmentalists, religious minorities and challenged the AKP authoritarianism in June 2015 elections. After the 2002 and 2007 elections, the AKP managed to win the struggle against the military-bureaucratic establishment via changing the constitution in 2007 and in 2010. The HDP managed to break the AKP’s electoral and parliamentary dominance in June 2015 when the latter lost majority thanks to the widening support base of the former. Each of these moments (2002, 2007 and 2015-June) signified a potential opportunity for democratization in Turkey since the power was shifting in favor of what many perceived as the ‘democratic opposition’ vis-à-vis an authoritarian-leaning state establishment. This chapter underlines paying attention to the officeseeking or policy-seeking behavior of political parties, in the context of their populist democracy-related discourse in predicting the influence of the mobilization they bring on the direction of regime change. It is in © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Ayan Musil, The Transformation of Kurdish and Islamist Parties in Turkey, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06293-3_5

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these strategic structural moments in which the choices of the actors matter. Recent research shows that ‘the notion of democracy’ among people’s perceptions can ironically be authoritarian especially if, along with popular sovereignty, people understand ‘obedience to the rulers’ from democracy (Kirsch and Welzel 2019). Obedience, as Kirsch and Welzel (2019, 64) argue, addresses an authoritarian ideal that violates the right to oppose those in power or to vote them out of office. Hence, once the ‘democratic opposition’ comes to power in the name of the people and demands obedience from them against the ‘old authoritarian elites,’ a process of autocratization or what Tomini (2018) calls an ‘incumbent entrenchment’ is likely to unfold. This implies that a discourse of democracy is insufficient for democratic improvement but can trigger the transformation of autocratic institutions. The main argument of this book is to pay attention to the officeseeking and policy-seeking goals of political parties in order to account for the democratizing impact of their mobilizational force. The question yet is how to differentiate an office-seeking (or an instrumentalist) behavior from a policy-seeking one when the party campaign is based on the discourse of democracy against an authoritarian state establishment. Chapter 2 showed that a party’s stress on effective governance and competence, coupled with ‘ideological incoherence’ are important signifiers for an office-seeking behavior and these signifiers become more evident once the party rules for a certain period in public office. Based on the extant literature, the same chapter also underlined three factors that increase the likelihood of a party’s office-seeking behavior: (1) the party’s ties with business groups within a context of economic liberalization, (2) the absence of internal party democracy that removes the constraints of the party organization over the party elite and (3) an uncompromising state that prompts pragmatism rather than ideological change for the party. In this sense, I showed that the AKP had the characteristics of an office-seeking party at the early stages of its foundation whereas the HDP was divided between an office-seeking goal in the east and a policy-seeking goal at the national level. While the eastern wing of the party aims to keep control of the local offices in the Kurdish political region, the party at the national level focuses on Turkey-ization. (Türkiyelile¸smek). In this chapter, I argue that it is these party goals—that played the fundamental role in autocratizing the Turkish regime rather than democratizing it. While making this argument, I do not underestimate the

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importance of other explanations on why the Turkish democratic regime collapsed and provide a brief overview on these explanations below. However, I do prioritize the role of agents and the need to better understand their strategies compared to other factors because these strategies matter in structures with increasing opportunities, which have been the case for 2002, 2007 and 2015-June elections. It was in these elections that a party’s ownership of the issue of democracy changed the domestic balance of power and posed a threat against the repressive or authoritarian policies of the powerholders. In other words, these elections constituted the ‘critical junctures’ at which the Turkish regime could have democratized, but certain agential choices prevented this possibility. Just as in Gandhi’s (2019, e11) definition of democracy, it was at these moments Turkish democracy was a ‘fragile system that [could] be undone by unscrupulous elites who use[d] the institutions of democracy to slowly but surely undermine it.’ Next section briefly describes the process of autocratization in the AKP era of governance and why the party goals (office-seeking vs. policyseeking) should be considered as an important factor as opposed to the other existing explanations on the breakdown of democracy in Turkey.

5.1 Regime Change Toward Competitive Authoritarianism in Turkey Since 2007 Following the AKP’s rise to power in 2002, there was a short period, until 2007, when Turkey’s scores on political rights and rule of law boosted according to the data from the V-Dem index (see Fig. 5.1). Yet, since its second term in office (2007–2011), the AKP drifted toward an inclusionary populist platform both in rhetoric and actions (Ayan Musil 2021). Many scholars (mis)interpreted this second phase as a process of democratization with problems (Sözen 2020). During its third term in office (2011–2015), the AKP breached media independence, freedom of demonstrations and the rule of law. The AKP’s excessively majoritarian or even plebiscitarian conception of democracy became visible especially during the Gezi Park protests in 2013 (Özbudun 2014). The concepts such as ‘executive degradation’ (Diamond 2015) or ‘executive aggrandizement’ (Bermeo 2016) can be used to define the gradual process of democratic breakdown under the AKP rule in Turkey from 2007 until present time.

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Fig. 5.1 Decline of democracy in Turkey according to V-Dem index (2002– 2020)

The first step came through the public approval of constitutional amendments proposed by the AKP in 2010 referendum in a highly polarized atmosphere. The amendments included two important changes in the constitution: First, it strengthened the democratically elected government’s control over the military by making it possible that the coup plotters be tried in civilian courts. Second, it brought a complete restructuring of the judiciary, giving parliament and the president greater say in the composition of the Constitutional Court. Until then, one of Turkey’s major problems with democracy was the existence of a militarybureaucratic elite within the state that restricted inter-party competition. As Heper (1992, 188) once argued: The bureaucratic elites, at least in practice, opted for rule from above rather than the rule of law. They remained insensitive to political realities. Politicians in turn attempted to have the last word on all matters. In post-1950 Turkey, the polity was characterized by either a bureaucratic and/or military tutelage or a debilitating pluralism. The politicians could not double as statesmen, nor would they tolerate others to play that role.

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The liberal intellectuals interpreted the amendments proposed by the AKP and adopted by 58 percent of the popular vote, as what could finally break the grip of the army over civilian politics. Although this reform was supposed to be democratizing the regime, it was soon proven that the changes rather secured executive control over the judiciary. The fact that the AKP dominated the majority of the seats in parliament gave massive power to the AKP government over the judicial branch. Now that the AKP’s long-standing rival, the military, was marginalized, it could smoothly abuse its political power to dominate judicial institutions (such as the Constitutional Court and the High Council of Judges and Prosecutors [HSYK—Hakim ve Savcılar Yüksek Kurulu]). The first post-referendum election for a new HSYK in October 2010 resulted in the election of pro-government judges and prosecutors by their peers in general and administrative courts, as allowed by the new constitutional changes (Keyman and Gumuscu 2014, 49). The AKP deviated from the rule of law via initiating a power struggle not only against the independent judiciary, but in particular, the Gülen Cemaat , allegedly serving within the judicial bodies and the police force (even though this stood in sharp contrast to the party’s earlier, positive relations with the Cemaat ). Fethullah Gülen, a Turkish preacher living in exile in the US was the leader of the Cemaat. The European Commission also concluded that the AKP’s campaign against the ‘parallel structure’ within the state (i.e. the Gülen Cemaat ) encroached on the judiciary’s independence (Saatçio˘glu 2016). On the other side, media freedoms deteriorated since 2011. Particularly during and after the Gezi protests, the media faced tremendous pressure from the government: censorship and self-censorship were common; many media workers lost their jobs; TV stations that aired the protests were fined on the basis of inciting violence. Censorship and self-censorship in both public and private media outlets and the disproportionate and biased coverage of the AKP by the state-owned Turkish Radio and Television have gradually become a norm (Yılmaz 2016). When Erdo˘gan was elected as president in 2014, the party vision merged with a ‘model of executive presidency, whereby the president considered himself the embodiment of “national democracy” and custodian of its unity’ (Cizre 2016). The waning horizontal accountability, centralization of political rule under a cult figure embodying the nation between 2011 and 2014 paved the way for the argument that Turkey’s tutelary democracy was replaced with delegative democracy (Ta¸s 2015).

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The electoral component score seriously went down in the local and presidential elections in 2014 and the snap elections in 2015. In the June 2015 elections, the AKP lost its parliamentary majority with a vote share of 40.9 percent. Yet, rather than accepting electoral loss, Erdo˘gan, now as the president of Turkey, prepared the grounds for a new election via prioritizing the existential threats against the nation and re-securitization of the Kurdish question (Sahin 2021). According to the main opposition CHP, Erdo˘gan’s influence over the AKP was the main reason for the collapse of coalition negotiations, after the June 2015 elections.1 Sayarı (2016, 3) also explains the breakdown in coalition talks not only as the result of ‘the failure of the opposition parties to coordinate their strategies’ but ‘President Erdo˘gan’s determined pursuit of a new election that, he believed, would reinstate the AKP’s majority in the parliament.’ Indeed, the AKP regained majority on 1 November 2015. The result of this national election was highly controversial. The assessment of the election by the OSCE (2016, 11–12) showed that the campaigning environment was seriously characterized by unfairness and fear. The highly securitized political environment and the resurgence of the violent conflict with the PKK between the June and November 2015 general elections led to the classification of the political regime in Turkey as ‘competitive authoritarianism’ (Esen and Gumuscu 2016). Figure 5.1 compares the indicators for civil liberties, the rule of law and the electoral component of democracy according to V-Dem data from 2002 to 2020. It shows that the electoral component of Turkish democracy was still stable compared to a decline in the scores for civil liberties and the rule of law during the democratic recession (2007–2015). Since November 2015, autocratization continued in a speedy manner in Turkey. On 15 July 2016, Turkey survived an attempted coup d’etat led by a faction within the Turkish military. Upon the failure of the coup attempt, the government blamed the Gülen Cemaat for the attempted coup. The Gülen Cemaat, at that time, had established various foundations, associations, media organizations and schools across the country. On 22 July 2016, formally affirming the Cemaat as a terrorist organization and its leader Fethullah Gülen a terrorist, the government declared state of emergency ‘to be able to remove swiftly all the elements of the terrorist organization involved in the coup attempt.’2 Later on, the state of emergency in Turkey was extended six more times, which was supposed to end in October 2017. According to the Turkish legislation, under the

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state of emergency, the president’s decrees could not be overruled by parliament, except by a supermajority. The state of emergency in Turkey witnessed the violation of fundamental political rights and civil liberties in the securitization environment led by the AKP and the president Erdo˘gan. Over 150,000 people— including soldiers, police, judicial officials, civil servants, academics and schoolteachers—were detained, arrested or dismissed from their positions in a massive purge of suspected coup plotters and other perceived enemies of the state. From September to December 2016, the government removed 28 HDP mayors from their posts, while 12 HDP deputies, including the party’s co-leaders, were arrested and 2700 local HDP politicians were jailed (Freedom House 2017). On 16 April 2017, under the state of emergency situation, Turkey held a referendum, aimed at changing the government system from parliamentary to a presidential one. It was a slim majority of Turks who approved the constitutional change which allowed the winner of the 2018 presidential election to undertake full control of the government. OSCE/ODIHR evaluation (2017) pronounced the referendum as an uneven contest and suspected that up to 2.5 million votes could have been manipulated. As a result, Turkey experienced a power shift from parliamentary supremacy to a very strong executive, deterioration of the independence and impartiality of the judiciary and a lack of effective checks and balances. Since then, the regime resembles ‘neo-patrimonial sultanism’ (Kalaycıo˘glu and Kocapınar 2021) and is categorized as a ‘not free’ country according to Freedom House.

5.2 Existing Explanations on the Collapse of the Turkish Democracy Among various explanations analyzing the collapse of the Turkish democracy, the AKP’s economic governance policies labeled either as ‘crony capitalism’ (Esen and Gumuscu 2021) or ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ (Tansel 2018), the interaction of the AKP’s populism with domestic and international factors (Castaldo 2018), the combination of populism with a ‘personalistic mass type’ of party organization (Baykan 2018), the long-standing culture of zero-sum game politics (Somer 2016, 2019), existential insecurity (Akkoyunlu and Öktem 2016) or the generation of a Kulturkampf between two irreconcilable worldviews and rising levels

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of partisanship in the country (Çarkoglu and Kalaycioglu 2021) provide certain insights. It is important to distinguish some explanations that focus on the later stages of the AKP era of governance from earlier stages. For instance, Esen and Gümü¸sçü’s (2021) main focus is to understand the breakdown of democracy in Turkey that was already experiencing autocratization. According to Lührmann and Lindberg (2019), the concept of autocratization means any move away from full democracy, covers both sudden democratic breakdowns, and a longer term gradual process within and outside of democratic regimes where democratic traits decline. This definition keeps the distinction between democratic recessions, democratic breakdowns and further consolidation of already authoritarian regimes. From the perspective of a long-term process of autocratization, Esen and Gümü¸sçü’s (2021) main question is how it was possible for the voters to support a political party that had already been undermining accountability and civil liberties. They argue that it came as the consequence of a growing coalition of partisan clients (representing different socioeconomic groups) that benefited from the policies of a democratically elected government but started supporting its authoritarian tendencies for fear that they might lose their privileges once the government changed hands. According to this framework, the party created a triangular dependency resting on partisan resource allocation toward the economic elites and the urban poor and these groups’ fear of future redistribution of their current benefits under the AKP government drove up their cost of toleration. In an earlier article, the two authors (2018) had argued that the AKPbusiness relations was also the driving force behind the rise of competitive authoritarianism in Turkey. While the authors provide an innovative argument that sheds light on what leads to democratic breakdown, the other studies mentioned above focus more on the earlier stages of autocratization and are therefore more relevant regarding the main question of this chapter: Why did the critical junctures at 2002, 2007, June-2015 elections did not democratize the regime, on the contrary, cultivated autocratization? Castaldo (2018) and Baykan (2018) underline the usage of populism by the AKP in Turkey’s democratic breakdown even though they both acknowledge that populism alone was not sufficient. They consider the institutional crisis triggered by the 2007 presidential election, the ememorandum by the military and the later attempt by the Constitutional

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Court to ban the AKP in 2008 as opportunities for the AKP (and Recep Tayyip Erdo˘gan) to increase the dose of populism, assault those institutions, colonize them and deploy them against opponents to prevent similar threats in the future. However, along with populism, Castaldo also argues that Turkey’s integration process to the EU contributed to the initial strategic moderation of Erdo˘gan and delayed the emergence of competitive authoritarianism. While the EU officially aimed at Turkey’s democratization, the unintended result was rather the contribution to the rise of competitive authoritarianism in Turkey, supporting a leader far less democratic than expected and weakening those institutions (i.e. the military) that had prevented the emergence of such leaders in the past (Castaldo 2018, 483). On the other side, the organizational attributes of the AKP as a personalistic mass party played the most fundamental role, according to Baykan (2018). More specifically, according to him, it was the combination of a ‘low-populist’ style and a large and pervasive membership organization tightly controlled by a diligent leadership, supported by political marketing techniques and extensive media control that was central to the political resilience of the AKP and this gradually paved the way for the rise of a competitive authoritarian regime in Turkey (Baykan 2018, 256). The analyses prioritizing the role of political agency (similar to this book’s approach) are in a way complemented by cultural approaches providing the justifications for the AKP’s choice to autocratize and to democratize the regime. Somer argues that Turkey is a case where pactbuilding, ‘consensual rule-making’ and ‘explicit and formal compromises’ culture among rival actors have been comparatively weak (Somer 2014, 2016). Since Turkey’s transition to democracy in 1950, the political elites (or parties) representing different (or even sometimes overlapping political interests), such as the secularists, Islamists, nationalists and the liberals, have had the tendency to deny the legitimacy of each other. They perceived politics as a zero-sum game. The party system could not be institutionalized due to a lack of mutual trust within inter-party relationships (Yardimci-Geyikçi 2018). While the salience of the socio-cultural cleavages (secular vs. religious, Turkish nationalist vs. Kurdish nationalist) as opposed to the socioeconomic cleavage (left vs. right) has been a dominant factor for the lack of inter-party trust, another reason was also related to the non-cumulative cleavage structure: For instance, by the year 2015, while the AKP and the CHP were closer in their attitudes toward nationalism, their positions differed greatly on secularism; and

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similarly while the MHP and the HDP stood at opposite ends of the spectrum on nationalism, they were closer in their attitudes toward secularism (Yardimci-Geyikçi 2018, 230). Similar to these arguments, in Chapter 4, I have also shown that the AKP owned the issue of democracy and won the organized support from a coalition of supporters (i.e. the Kurds and the liberals) against a non-compromising state elite, which explicitly joined forces with the voters of the CHP (and with the MHP) during the 2007 national elections. A compromise between the two camps seemed impossible at that time since each camp perceived the other side as an illegitimate rival. The legacy of zero-sum politics in modern Turkish history is indeed an important factor that prevents the creation of a consensual style of democracy during these key political moments. This legacy is constitutive of why political parties choose to have an office-seeking strategy over policy-seeking ones. In other words, the goal of the party becomes not only to win the elections and form the government to implement its policies but also influence and shape the state structure in favor of its interests against political rivals, who may follow a similar strategy once they come to power. This is what Somer (2007) also calls a strategy to ‘conquer the state’ since these party elites that are in government are preoccupied with the question of who controls and represents the state rather than the question of how to make the state more responsive and accountable, whoever governs it. On a similar vein, Akkoyunlu and Öktem (2016) argue that the battles particularly between the AKP, the Kemalist and Gülenist actors were fueled by historically rooted fears, ambitions and resentments in which the democratic middle ground between domination and annihilation ceased to exist. They further consider the AKP’s first term in office as an era of political liberalization, due to the ‘the outcome of a tentative power balance between warring factions at a time of relative geopolitical stability and normative EU influence’ (Akkoyunlu and Öktem 2016, 520). Finally, one can note a similar argument in Carkoglu and Kalaycioglu’s (2021) recent analysis of the AKP era between 2002 and 2015, with regard to Turkish autocratization. Based on original survey data collected systematically in representative samples of the Turkish voting-age population from 2002 to 2015, the two leading scholars of survey research argue that the AKP era witnessed the erosion of the Center-Periphery (CP) cleavage and the generation of a Kulturkampf between two contrasting and irreconcilable worldviews—one built around a positivistic understanding of science, reason

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and secularism, and another rooted in tradition, Sunni Islam, and family values (Çarkoglu and Kalaycioglu 2021, 48). As the Turkish socioeconomic development and cultural transformation decomposed the CP cleavage over time, the Center was effectively penetrated by the political agents of the Periphery, which was united under the rule of the AKP (Çarkoglu and Kalaycioglu 2021, 47). Accompanied with the rising levels of partisanship and ideological polarization, the authors show that the AKP maneuvered the trade-off between the short-term economic and long-term ideological factors and its voters realigned with a radical ideology, taking the country to an authoritarian path. Hence, the concepts such as the Kulturkampf , existential insecurities, zero-sum game, which are used by the prominent scholars of Turkish politics to understand the autocratization process in Turkey have a common ground and show a tacit agreement in the field. The choices of the political agents to create ‘personalistic parties,’ to use a populist style or to follow an ‘office-seeking strategy’ should be considered within such cultural frameworks. The political-economy approach, on the other hand, focusing on the notion of ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ aims to establish continuities between the early and later stages of the AKP rule from a different angle. Tansel (2018) argues that ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ provides a linkage between what was considered to be the AKP’s ‘democratic policies’ from 2003 to 2010 and its ‘authoritarian practices’ after 2011. When it comes to its majoritarian and disciplinary policies, the approach states that the party had already started intensifying state control over social life during the early stages of its rule: The party’s labor policy agenda (Bozkurt-Güngen 2018) and coercive capture of media companies through government agencies (Ye¸sil 2018) were key aspects of its early authoritarian statecraft. What followed after 2011 as a majoritarian drift, was from the beginning perfectly consistent with early party policies. These explanations help us understand the cultural and politicaleconomic contexts that shape the choices of the AKP in 2002 and 2007 and reveal further reasons for its office-seeking strategy. Accessing and remaining first in government office and then controlling the state had become a priority for the party elite after the AKP’s Islamist predecessors, the RP and the FP faced significant levels of repression throughout the 1990s. The party elite’s control over the party organization further eliminated the possibility of organizational constraints that could have brought policy-seeking aims.

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5.3

The Office vs. Policy-Seeking Goals and the Regime Change After 2015

With all that been said, there is yet one question that remains unclear. Why did not the outcomes of the June 2015 election help democratize the regime? Can the AKP’s office-seeking strategy or authoritarian tendency alone explain the missed opportunity for democratization, the re-securitization of the Kurdish identity, repression and criminalization of the HDP in the aftermath of this elections? More importantly, why did the HDP and the AKP stand in sharp antagonism with one another in the electoral arena, despite an ongoing peace process between the AKP and the PKK in which the HDP was acting as the middleman? Instead of peace talks leading to a coalition between the two parties, the electoral rivalry between them fueled the collapse of the peace talks. Could not the AKP continue its office-seeking strategy via forming a coalition with the HDP after June 2015, rather than choosing to form a coalition with the ultranationalist MHP after November 2015? On the question of why the momentous June-2015 election could not democratize the regime, the explanation, I argue, must not only focus on the AKP’s officeseeking strategy but also take into account the complexity of the HDP’s party goals, first, as a national-level policy-seeking party and, second, as a regional-level office-seeking party. It has been argued that the electoral realities in June 2015, especially the polls prior to the election, suggesting that the HDP would pass the national threshold and deprive the AKP of the number of seats required for constitutional change resulted in the AKP’s shifting position against the peace process and led to 114 election-related attacks against the HDP (O’Connor and Baser 2018). In other words, the HDP was seen as a barrier that had to be removed so that the AKP could pursue its officeseeking strategy in government. But this argument does not explain why the AKP did not choose to co-opt (but chose rather to attack) the HDP to pursue its office-seeking strategy. On this point, one must understand the HDP’s dual goals and how they clashed with the AKP’s national-level office-seeking strategy. The HDP concentrated its efforts on two electoral demographics during the June 2015 elections, the anti-AKP middle classes, sympathetic to the struggle for Gezi Park and the former-AKP-voting Kurds who were demoralized with the stagnation of the peace process (O’Connor & Baser). This is quite in line with the two party goals that I had introduced

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for the HDP: the policy-seeking goal with a more encompassing agenda on human rights, workforce and environmental justice (rather than just the rights of the Kurdish minority), which gained organized support from various groups almost as a result of the HDP’s anti-Erdogan or antiAKP image in this election, as Chapter 4 has demonstrated. Indeed, the HDP’s refusal to support Erdo˘gan’s referendum to bring in a presidential system and Demirta¸s’s declaration to Erdo˘gan that ‘we shall not make you president’ [‘seni ba¸skan yaptırmayaca˘gız’] were considered as a defining moment in the electoral campaigns (Kaya and Whiting 2019). On the other hand, Chapter 3, through interview evidence, has shown that the pro-Kurdish activists were convinced about ‘the dishonesty of the AKP government’ to resolve the conflict during the peace process. Utilizing the ongoing stagnation over the peace process, the HDP could reduce the AKP’s popularity in the region and pursue its regional-level office-seeking strategy. It was able to re-attain political control over the Kurdish provinces that it had previously lost to the AKP in June 2015. As a follow-up to its success both at the national and regional level, then, it was rational for the HDP to seek alliance with the opposition parties in the parliament against the ruling AKP. This strategy was evident, since the HDP chairman, Demirta¸s, made it clear that his party would support any oppositional candidate against the AKP’s candidate during the parliamentary voting on the election of the TBMM spokesperson in June 2015. On the other side, the HDP’s new policy-seeking goal was insufficient to convince the other opposition actors to cooperate with it. The ultranationalist MHP made it clear that it would wave aside the HDP in parliament and not back any candidate supported by the HDP. In this sense, when the HDP publicized its support for the CHP’s candidate, Deniz Baykal, the MHP chairman Devlet Bahçeli announced that his party members would cast an invalid vote in order not to vote for a candidate supported by the HDP. That is how the AKP’s candidate, Ismet Yılmaz, was elected through a majority vote in parliament to be the next spokesperson of the TBMM.3 As Selçuk and Hekimci (2020, 1502) also explain, the opposition coordination over democratic values failed to overcome the polarizing Turkish-Kurdish cleavage even though the CHP aimed to bring the HDP and the MHP together to form a coalition government right after the newly elected representatives of the parties gathered at the TBMM in June 2015. In the five-month period until the early election on 1 November 2015, a series of terrorist attacks further

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highlighted the Turkish-Kurdish cleavage and enabled the criminalization of the HDP. Rather than working with the ‘separatist’ HDP, the MHP leader Bahçeli, later on, preferred to work with the AKP rule. Following the coup attempt on 15 July 2016, Bahçeli also started expressing his support to the presidential system proposal, which led to the formation of the AKP-MHP alliance in the new system. What followed afterwards was the marginalization of the HDP in the political space. Following the approval of a bill to strip the MPs of immunity from prosecution in May 2016, the way for the trials of the party representatives was cleared. The two leaders and nine parliamentarians of the HDP were jailed in the same year. Confronted with further electoral losses in 2019 local elections, the ruling AKP government dismissed the several democratically elected mayors in Kurdish cities—and replaced them with state-appointed trustees or kayyums to expand its patronage networks (Tepe and Alemdaro˘glu 2021). Ironically, this process resembles the removal of the RP (the AKP’s predecessor) from government by force through a military intervention initiated on 28 February 1997. Such suppressions over a party have the potential to reinforce an office-seeking strategy rather than fostering a policy-seeking one, as discussed in Chapter 2. In other words, the party—through a class of elites—starts emphasizing a pragmatic emphasis on being ‘competent,’ ‘capable’ and ‘confrontational’ over policy goals and prioritizes using all the means to go back to office. Hence, upon the constitution of a future democratic regime in Turkey, one should be cautious about the regional office-seeking goals (and a potential sub-national domination it can establish in the region), which would challenge its nationwide policy-seeking goal in introducing equal rights, freedoms, justice and democracy to the country.

Notes 1. On this point, the CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaro˘glu stated that, ‘it is clear that Erdo˘gan does not want a coalition government because such a government would end the extra-constitutional role he is seeking.’Al Jazeera “Turkish Government Crisis Makes Early Elections a Reality”, 20 August 2015. https://studies.aljazeera.net/en/positionpapers/2015/08/ 2015820103912686833.html. 2. Al Jazeera, “Turkey’s failed coup attempt: All you need to know”, 15 July 2017, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/7/15/turkeys-failed-coupattempt-all-you-need-to-know. 3. “Meclis Ba¸skanını seçti.” Sözcü, 1 July 2015, https://www.sozcu.com.tr/ 2015/gundem/meclis-baskanini-seciyor-874496/.

5

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177

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Appendix

Religious Party Activists No.

Affiliated with

R1

RP, FP, AKP

R2

Interview date

Interview place

Role in the party

23.07.2018

Kayseri

RP, FP, AKP

04.07.2018

Ankara

R3

RP, FP, AKP

09.07.2018

Ankara

R4

AKP

10.07.2018

Ankara

Twice was an MP candidate. Former member of the provincial organization Former Parliamentarian between 1995 and 2007 Former Parliamentarian between 2002 and 2007, current district party chair Former Parliamentarian between 2002 and 2007, current central committee member (continued)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Ayan Musil, The Transformation of Kurdish and Islamist Parties in Turkey, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06293-3

181

182

APPENDIX

(continued) No.

Affiliated with

R5

AKP

R6

Interview date

Interview place

Role in the party

10.07.2018

Ankara

AKP

26.07.2019

Ankara

R7

AKP

25.07.2018

Ankara

R8

RP, FP, SP, AKP

18.07.2018

Aydin

R9

AKP

02.08.2018

Diyarbakir

R10

AKP

20.07.2018

Kayseri

R11

AKP

15.07.2018

Aydin

R12

RP, FP

10.01.2010

˙ Istanbul

R13

FP

14.01.2011

Phone interview

R14

AKP

27.09.2007

Diyarbakir

R15

AKP

28.09.2007

Diyarbakir

R16

RP, FP, AKP

28.09.2007

Diyarbakir

R17

AKP

29.09.2007

Diyarbakir

Former Parliamentarian between 2007 and 2011, former provincial chair 2013–2015 Former Minister, Former Parliamentarian between 2007 and 2015 Former Parliamentarian between 2002 and 2015, current central committee member Provincial Party Activist since younghood Party Provincial Activist since 2002 Party activist at the Provincial level since 2012 Parliamentarian 2018-present Parliamentarian 1995–2002 Elected parliamentarian in 1999 (MP status annulled, same year) Former Parliamentarian 2007–2011 Provincial party activist District party activist District party activist (continued)

APPENDIX

183

(continued) No.

Affiliated with

R18

AKP

R19

Interview date

Interview place

Role in the party

29.09.2007

Diyarbakir

AKP

30.09.2007

Diyarbakir

R20

RP, FP, SP, AKP

30.09.2007

Diyarbakir

R21

RP, AKP

17.10.2007

Istanbul

R22

AKP

17.10.2007

Istanbul

R23

AKP

18.10.2007

Istanbul

R24

AKP

19.10.2007

Istanbul

R25

AKP

06.10.2007

Izmir

R26 R27

AKP RP, FP, AKP

07.10.2007 07.10.2007

Izmir Izmir

R28

AKP

10.10.2007

Mersin

R29

AKP

10.10.2007

Mersin

R30

AKP

11.10.2007

Mersin

R31

AKP

12.10.2007

Mersin

District party activist District party activist Provincial party activist District party activist District party activist District party activist District party activist District party activist District party chair District party activist District party activist District party activist District party activist District party activist

Ethnic Party Activists No.

Affiliated with

E1

HDP

Interview date Interview place 11.07.2018

Ankara

Role in the party Communications Director of a Non-profit Organization in Support of the Kurdish Peace Process and the HDP (continued)

184

APPENDIX

(continued) No.

Affiliated with

E2

BDP, HDP

03.07.2018

Ankara

E3

HADEP, DEHAP, DTP, BDP, HDP HDP

12.07.2018

Ankara

16.07.2018

Ankara

E5

HDP and predecessors

16.07.2018

Ankara

E6

HDP

28.07.2018

Ankara

E7

BDP, HDP

28.07.2018

Ankara

E8

HDP

17.07.2018

Izmir

E9

HADEP, DEHAP, DTP, BDP, HDP

17.07.2018

Izmir

E10

BDP, HDP

17.07.2018

Izmir

E11

18.07.2018

Izmir

18.07.2018

Izmir

E13

DEHAP, DTP, BDP, HDP DEHAP, DTP, BDP, HDP DTP, BDP, HDP

29.07.2018

Ankara

E14

HDP

29.07.2018,

Ankara

E4

E12

Interview date Interview place

Role in the party HDP Advisor to the Party Executive Board HDP Provincial Co-chair Green Left Party Executive Board Member (The party is constituent of the HDP) HDP Activist who previously worked on different levels of the party but did not want to give further details HDP Deputy in Turkish Parliament. Leftist activist HDP Deputy in Turkish Parliament. Human Rights Activist HDP Provincial Board Member HDP Parliamentary Candidate and Founder of the Association that unites families who lost their relatives in the armed struggle HDP Activist and Journalist for the Jinnah news agency HDP Provincial Board Member HDP Provincial Co-chair HDP Deputy in Turkish Parliament. Feminist Activist HDP Party Congress Member and Member of the Commission for the Disabled (continued)

APPENDIX

185

(continued) No.

Affiliated with

E15

HEP, DEP, HADEP, DEHAP, DTP, BDP, HDP

29.07.2018

Ankara

E16

DEP, HADEP, DEHAP, DTP, BDP, HDP

31.07.2018

Diyarbakır

E17

BDP, HDP

31.07.2018

Diyarbakır

E18

BDP, HDP

02.08.2018

Diyarbakır

E19

HDP

18.07.2018

Izmir

E20

HDP

15.07.2018

Ankara

E21

HADEP, DEHAP, DTP HEP, DEP, HADEP, DEHAP, DTP HADEP, DEHAP, DTP DEHAP, DTP

01.10.2007

Diyarbakır

01.10.2007

Diyarbakır

02.10.2007

Diyarbakır

02.10.2007

Diyarbakır

HADEP, DEHAP, DTP HADEP, DEHAP, DTP DEP, HADEP, DEHAP, DTP HADEP, DEHAP, DTP DTP DEHAP, DTP HADEP, DEHAP, DTP DTP

19.10.2007

Istanbul

Provincial party activist Provincial party activist District party activist

20.10.2007

Istanbul

District party activist

20.10.2007

Istanbul

District party activist

21.10.2007

Istanbul

District party activist

21.10.2007 05.10.2007 05.10.2007

Istanbul Izmir Izmir

District party activist District party activist District party activist

06.10.2007

Izmir

District party activist

E22 E23 E24 E25 E26 E27 E28 E29 E30 E31 E32

Interview date Interview place

Role in the party HDP Deputy in Turkish Parliament. Kurdish Movement Activist HDP Activist and Representative of the Kurdish Women Movement HDP Provincial Co-chair Mesopotamia Foundation Representative Green-Left Party, Provincial Co-chair (The party is a constituent of the HDP) Green-Left Party, Provincial Co-chair (The party is a constituent of the HDP) Provincial party activist District party activist

(continued)

186

APPENDIX

(continued) No.

Affiliated with

E33

HADEP, DEHAP, DTP DTP HEP, DEP, HADEP, DEHAP, DTP

E34 E35

Interview date Interview place

Role in the party

12.10.2007

Mersin

District party activist

13.10.2007 13.10.2007

Mersin Mersin

District party activist District party activist

Index

0–9 28 February, 24, 44, 61, 63, 116, 121, 176. See also military intervention, of 1997 1991 elections, 46, 52 1995 elections, 44, 46, 48, 61 2002 elections, 2–4, 15, 18, 21, 28, 40, 57, 59, 60, 62, 82, 103–105, 112, 113, 119, 123, 124, 134, 154, 163, 170, 173 2007 elections, 2–4, 15, 21, 28, 40, 51–53, 60, 82, 103, 104, 119, 124, 126, 133, 134, 137, 140, 154, 163, 170, 172, 173 2010 constitutional amendments, 115, 166 2010 constitutional referendum, 82 2014 local elections, 144 2014 presidential elections, 15, 144, 154 2015 elections, 2, 73 June, 3, 4, 15, 19, 21, 27, 40, 82, 89, 91, 94, 97, 103, 104, 144,

148, 149, 151, 154, 163, 168, 170, 174, 175 November, 168, 174, 175 2018 elections, 73

A AKP, 3, 4, 8, 10, 11, 14, 18, 19, 21, 23, 24, 26–28, 30, 31, 39, 40, 44, 46, 48, 58, 61–64, 71–73, 81, 82, 88, 103, 104, 107, 112, 114–116, 118–122, 125, 126, 130–133, 135, 136, 145, 149, 167, 168, 171–173 alliance with the MHP, 176 as a government, 9, 10, 18, 19, 24, 25, 30, 41, 49–51, 83, 85, 87, 91, 92, 94, 95, 104, 134, 142, 144, 146, 150, 152, 165, 174–176 as an office-seeking party, 23, 30, 40, 41, 56, 64, 66, 81, 156, 164, 173, 174

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Ayan Musil, The Transformation of Kurdish and Islamist Parties in Turkey, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06293-3

187

188

INDEX

authoritarian policies of, 14, 30, 84, 92, 94, 95, 144–146, 149, 152–154, 167, 173, 174 emergence of, 44, 45, 57 intraparty autocracy in, 65 leadership of, 87, 88, 104, 112, 121, 123, 126 neoliberal policies of, 10, 19, 60 organized support for, 26, 27, 40, 44, 46, 48, 114, 123, 154, 172 AKP as a government, 88, 153 Alevis in Turkey, 145, 151 ANAP, 7, 39, 41, 43, 58, 63 anti-system party, 6, 21, 32, 136 AP, 7, 58 Association of Independent Industrialists and Businessmen. See MÜSIAD Association of Turkish Industrialists and Businessmen. See TÜSIAD Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal, 127, 128, 132, 134 autocratization, 145, 164, 170 in Turkey, 165, 168–170, 172, 173 of Turkey, 95 B Bahçeli, Devlet, 175, 176 ˙ Ba¸sbu˘g, Ilker, 125 Baykal, Deniz, 126, 132, 139, 175 BDP, 25, 39, 49, 53, 72, 91, 92, 95, 145, 146 deputies of, 96 leadership of, 92 Bozarslan, Hamit, 9, 47, 52 Büyükanıt, Ya¸sar, 125, 126 C Çandar, Cengiz, 26, 115–118, 137–139, 154 Çarko˘glu, Ali, 9, 105, 119, 170, 173

cartel party thesis, 56, 57 catch-all parties, 12 causal mechanism, 1, 11, 12, 103, 104, 155 Cemal, Hasan, 26, 60, 85, 86, 115, 117, 118, 137, 140–142, 154 center-periphery framework, 172, 173 on Turkish politics, 22 CHP, 22, 42, 51–53, 59, 94, 107, 126, 127, 131–133, 138, 141, 168, 171, 172, 175 Çiçek, Cemil, 129, 130 coalition governments, 3 communist parties, 12 confrontational strategy of a party, 104 of the AKP, 107, 112–114, 118, 121, 122, 129, 130, 133, 134 of the HDP, 144, 147, 149, 153, 154 Constitutional Court, 11, 30, 49, 85, 86, 110, 111, 115, 126, 127, 129–131, 133, 139–141, 154, 166, 167, 171 Constitution of 1982, 6, 116, 126, 139–141 coup attempt (2016), 168, 176 Cyprus conflict, 87 D DBP, 69, 81 de-democratization, 4, 143, 146, 165 DEHAP, 6, 28, 49, 50, 107, 119, 133 Demirel, Süleyman, 139 Demirta¸s, Selahattin, 92, 95, 145, 146, 148, 152, 154, 175 democracy, 85, 86 advocate of, 88 blow against, 113 bullet against, 82 consolidation of, 84

INDEX

desire for, 97 relationship to secularism, 116 struggle for, 104, 109, 114 victory of, 142 violation of, 83 Democracy Party. See DEP Democratic Regions Party. See DBP Democratic Society Congress. See DTK Democratic Society Movement. See DTH Democratic Society Party. See DTP Democratic Union Party. See PYD democratization, 1, 2, 10, 23, 31, 54, 72, 89, 121, 122, 154, 163 opportunity for, 2, 4, 39, 83, 123, 142, 155, 163, 174 DEP, 6, 49, 50 closure of, 49 deputies of, 49 discursive opportunity structure, 21, 30, 83, 92, 95, 97, 144 DP, 22, 42, 58 DSIP, 151 DSP, 58, 63, 133 DTH, 50 DTK, 69 DTP, 6, 26–28, 39, 49–53, 119, 133, 135, 136 activists of, 52 Duverger, 12 DYP, 44, 61

E early Republican era, 46 economic crisis, 24 in 2001, 57, 60, 81, 105 economic liberalization, 45, 58, 164 in Turkey, 45 election threshold, 3, 127, 133, 149, 174

189

e-memorandum issued on 27 April 2007, 126, 128, 131, 133, 140–142, 170 EMEP, 53 Erbakan, Necmettin, 24–26, 43, 46, 48, 58, 59, 61–64, 107, 108, 110–112, 123 Erdogan, Recep Tayyip, 18, 24, 49, 57–59, 62–64, 87, 88, 90–92, 107, 113, 118, 123, 125–127, 129–132, 134, 136, 144–148, 150, 154, 167, 171, 175 as the mayor of Istanbul, 108, 109, 121, 122 as the president, 168, 169 conviction of, 110, 112, 113 ethnic parties, 1, 2, 5, 6, 13, 15, 16, 21, 23, 163 EU, 17, 45, 46, 48, 56, 57, 60, 85, 87, 88, 172 perception of the AKP, 118 Turkey’s accession to, 29, 50, 60, 84, 85, 87, 88, 114, 117, 121, 124, 125, 136 EU reforms, 85, 87, 125 Europeanization, 21, 30, 83–85, 88, 90, 95 European Union. See EU

F feminist movement, 27, 105, 150, 151, 163 FP, 3, 6, 7, 26, 61–64, 71, 86, 107, 109–111, 135, 136, 173 closure of, 62, 107, 111, 112 dissolution of, 85 leadership of, 111, 112 Freedom and Democracy Party. See ÖZDEP Freedom House, 95

190

INDEX

G General Staff, 126, 128, 129 Gezi, 90 Park, 90, 95 protests, 19, 28, 91, 93, 95, 96, 144, 145, 149, 152, 167, 174 resistance, 21, 91, 96, 145, 149 uprisings, 90, 91, 97 GP, 107 Gül, Abdullah, 110–112, 117, 126, 127, 129, 132, 140 Gülen, Fethullah, 167, 168 Gülen movement, 144, 146, 167, 168

H HADEP, 6, 48, 49, 52, 107 HDK, 69 HDP, 2, 4, 8, 10, 11, 14, 15, 18, 19, 21, 24, 25, 27–31, 40, 66, 68, 69, 72, 73, 81, 83, 90, 92–96, 103, 105, 136, 144, 145, 151, 155, 172, 175 as an office-seeking party, 24, 25, 31, 40, 41, 57, 66, 81, 164, 174, 175 as a policy-seeking party, 25, 40, 41, 56, 66, 72, 73, 156, 164, 174, 175 criminalization of, 68, 169, 174, 176 intra-party democracy of, 72 leadership of, 92, 97, 154 marginalization of, 176 organized support for, 26, 27, 40, 144, 175 HEP, 3, 6, 9, 49, 52, 67 closure of, 49 deputies of, 49, 51, 52 High Council of Judges and Prosecutors. See HSYK HSYK, 167

I ˙ Imralı talks, 91. See also peace talks inclusion-moderation thesis, 12–14 internal party democracy, 58, 64, 65, 164 lack of, 64, 65 Islam, 41, 42, 47, 110 compatibility with economic liberalism, 45 Islamic identity, 119 Islamic State (ISIS), 7, 94, 152 Islamism, 9 Islamist movement, 5, 7, 41, 43 Islamist party(ies), 1, 5, 6, 12, 13, 15, 39, 41, 44, 45, 48, 53, 54, 63, 71, 82, 103, 116, 130 Islamist-successor party, 39, 44, 57, 81, 103, 104 issue of democracy, 2, 20, 21, 48, 81, 82, 104, 107, 114, 121, 123, 130, 133, 144, 155, 172 issue ownership, 2, 19, 20 associative issue ownership, 19, 20 competence issue ownership, 19, 20, 121 theory of, 19, 20, 104 J Justice and Development Party. See AKP Justice Party. See AP Just Order, 46, 58, 59 K Kalaycıo˘glu, Ersin, 105, 119, 169, 170, 173 Katz, Richard S., 56, 57 kayyums , 176 KCK, 91, 146 Kemalism, 6, 41, 121 Kemalists, 95, 96

INDEX

Kobani events, 94, 152 Kurdish conflict, 50 Kurdish constituency, 25, 48, 49, 105, 119, 121, 122 Kurdish identity, 72, 114, 119, 121 desecuritisation of, 49, 50, 53, 89, 91 Kurdish issue, 29 Kurdish language, 85 Kurdish-led party, 2–4, 54, 69, 81, 89 Kurdish movement, 4, 5, 8, 9, 24, 26, 28, 40, 41, 51, 67, 69, 71, 89, 92, 93, 151, 152 alliance with the left, 52, 67 Kurdish opening (KO), 30, 40, 41, 48, 50, 81, 93, 134 Kurdish political region, 25, 40, 57, 66–69, 71, 73, 89, 118–120, 122, 135, 164 Kurdish question, 40, 48, 51, 53 Kurdish separatism, 48 Kurdish-successor party, 11, 14, 39, 49, 66, 90, 103, 104 Kurdistan Communities Union. See KCK Kurdistan Workers’ Party. See PKK Kutan, Recai, 110–112 L Laclau, Ernesto, 17, 18, 20, 104, 114, 154 LGBTI, 72, 73 LGBTQs, 4, 24, 147, 153, 163 liberal democrats, 4, 28 liberal intellectuals, 26, 46, 48, 104, 114, 115, 122, 133, 154, 167 M Mair, Peter, 56, 57 Mardin, Serif, ¸ 22 MÇP, 46

191

Menderes, Adnan, 109 MHP, 51, 94, 172, 174, 175 militant democracy, 6, 82 military-bureaucratic state, 24, 44, 48, 59, 62, 83, 85, 86, 95, 104, 110, 114–116, 121, 125, 126, 131, 132, 136, 138, 141, 142, 144, 154, 166 military government (1980–83), 6, 10, 41, 116 military intervention, 21, 154 of 1960, 42 of 1971, 43, 67 of 1980, 41, 67 of 1997, 24, 44, 57, 59, 176 Milli Görü¸s , 3, 6, 7, 10, 43, 61, 63, 107 Milliyet , 63, 85, 105, 109, 115, 117, 137, 141 Milliyet Gazetesi, 26 MIT, 146 MNP, 7, 43 moderation, 2, 10–12, 14, 15, 24, 58 definition of, 15 theories of, 11, 12, 16, 19, 21 Motherland Party. See ANAP MSP, 43 MÜSIAD, 45

N National Intelligence Organization. See MIT Nationalist Task Party. See MÇP National Order Party. See MNP National Outlook. See Milli Görü¸s National Salvation Party. See MSP National Security Council, 84 niche parties, 12

192

INDEX

O Öcalan, Abdullah, 24, 50, 51, 71–73, 92 capture of, 89 imprisonment of, 89 ÖDP, 53 office-seeking, 2, 23 behavior, 56 goal, 23, 31, 40, 54, 66, 164 party, 23, 30, 41, 55, 56, 65 organized support, 1, 4, 12, 19, 26, 27, 39, 40, 44, 54, 104, 114, 133, 144, 163 Ottoman, 42, 46 Ottoman Empire, 22 Özal, Turgut, 139 Özbudun, Ergun, 82, 165 ÖZDEP, 6 Özkök, Hilmi, 125

goal, 23, 24, 40, 54, 56, 164 party, 23, 30, 41, 55, 65 populism, 10, 11, 16, 18, 169–171 definition of, 16, 17 theories of, 11, 15, 16, 18–20, 104 theory of, 114, 154 post-1980 context, 8, 10, 39, 41, 43, 81 post-Gezi context, 28, 30, 83, 84, 91, 92, 95, 143, 150 post-Islamist party, 4, 39, 44, 54, 56, 118 process-tracing, 1, 5, 11, 12 pro-Kurdish party(ies), 3–8, 12, 15, 27, 28, 39, 41, 48, 50–54, 66–69, 82, 83, 89, 90, 103, 119, 136 activists of, 90, 91, 118, 120, 121 representatives of, 50 PYD, 94, 152

P parliamentary crisis in 1999, 107, 111, 112 in 2007, 126, 131 party behavior, 19 party dissolutions, 7, 82, 85 Peace and Democracy Party. See BDP peace process, 91–95, 144, 153, 174, 175 peace talks, 91, 95, 174 People’s Democracy Party. See HDP People’s Labor Party. See HEP Peoples’ Democratic Congress. See HDK PKK, 7, 24, 25, 49–51, 66–69, 71, 89–92, 94, 114, 134, 168, 174 the leadership of, 91 violence of, 49 policy-seeking behavior, 2, 55

R referendum of 2017, 169, 175 reformist faction of the Islamist party, 107, 110–112 regime change, 2, 3, 10, 39 religious parties, 1, 5–7, 12, 15, 16, 20, 21, 23, 121, 163 repressive state, 14, 21, 61, 63, 71, 81–84, 103, 104, 107, 110, 113, 114, 126, 130, 150, 154 Republican People’s Party. See CHP Republican rallies 2007, 127, 133, 140 Revolutionary Socialist Workers’ Party. See DSIP Rojava, 92, 94 RP, 3, 6, 7, 9, 14, 39, 40, 43–46, 48, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64, 71, 81, 110, 111, 117, 119, 120, 134–136, 173, 176

INDEX

closure of, 63, 111 Kurdish support for, 47, 48 leadership of, 110 S Saadet Partisi. See SP Sayarı, Sabri, 18, 107, 112, 168 scope condition, 82, 103 SDP, 53 secularism, 6, 108, 111, 116, 126, 127, 138, 171, 173 relationship to democracy, 116 secular-religious divide, 8, 9, 171 secular state, 14, 41–43, 111 semi-democratic context, 2, 12, 21, 103 Sezer, Ahmet Necdet, 125, 131, 139 SHP, 49, 52, 69 source of legitimacy of the party, 2, 30 SP, 62, 63, 107, 112 T traditionalist faction of the Islamist party, 110–112 Turkish armed forces (TAF), 125, 126, 128–131, 137, 141 Turkish foreign policy, 84 Turkish-Islam Synthesis (TIS), 30, 39–41, 43–45, 48, 53, 81 Turkish judiciary, 108, 115, 118, 166, 167 Turkish military, 21, 25, 30, 39, 117, 123, 128, 131, 141, 167, 168, 170

193

Turkish nationalism, 85 Turkish parliament, 94 Turkish Party Law, 64 Turkish party system, 53 Turkish regime, 95 Turkish right, 9, 10 Turkish state, 82, 91 Kurdish policies of, 89, 93 Türkiyeli, 24, 53, 96, 164 TÜSIAD, 45, 86

U US intervention in Iraq, 114, 117 perception of the AKP, 117, 118, 137

V Virtue Party. See FP vote-seeking goal, 40, 54, 55 party, 23, 58 voting behavior, 20

W Welfare Party. See RP

Y Young Party. See GP Yüksekda˘g, Figen, 150, 152