Crisis Populism: The Thick Ideological Core of Populist Politics in Turkey

Abstract

This chapter analyses how the Turkish government’s populist policies and discourses have evolved over time as the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi = AKP) has been losing popular support. Specifically, it looks at whether the Turkish government changed course or persisted across several subfields of politics: cultural, economic, immigration and foreign policy. Despite substantial changes in approaches to economic and foreign policy, there are other core areas of populist policies that have remained unchanged throughout the crisis. The reason for this remarkable level of persistence in the face of declining popularity is, we argue, the fact that these areas denote not only the core of the AKP’s message but also of the party’s and its leaders’ core ideological belief system. This empirical finding points to a wider need to reorient the debate over whether populists are thin ideologues that readily adapt their policy offerings to public sentiments. The analysis of how populist discourses evolved in the case of Turkey adds empirical weight to the claim that there is a certain thickness in populists’ ideology. This in turn may explain why populist parties in decline stick to some of their approaches even when their impact on popularity diminishes.