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Article published In: The Populist Radical Right Beyond Europe
Edited by Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser and Lisa Zanotti
[Journal of Language and Politics 22:3] 2023
► pp. 378–395

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Populist radical right beyond Europe

The case of Islamic nativism in Turkey

ORCiD logo with link | Ozyeğin University
Published online: 9 May 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.22130.bal
Abstract
Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) is one of the longest ruling among contemporary populist radical right parties (PRR). For nearly two decades, the AKP has shown tremendous success in achieving electoral dominance and political control. This article argues that AKP’s success lies in its ability to reconfigure the issue salience in Turkish politics by bringing the secular-conservative cleavage into the center of political competition. However, as this article shows, while the government’s framing of conservative/religious values was initially populist, as the Party consolidated its power, populism became secondary to nativism. This nativist turn is characterized by an emphasis on the foreignness of “the elites” and is shaped by secularization of the public sphere and antiwesternism. Overall, AKP has not presented a fundamental opposition to the “establishment” but brought together many components of Turkey’s institutional and cultural structure and radicalized patterns already present in earlier eras.
Article outline
  • 1.Populist radical right beyond Europe: The case of Islamic nativism in Turkey
  • 2.It is Us: Building a populist coalition
  • 3.Neoliberalism a la Turca
  • 4.It is Them: The conservative masses in power
  • 5.Are you Muslim enough? Political religion as a boundary marker
  • 6.Foreigners among us and anti-westernism
  • 7.The authoritarian path: A difference of degree or kind?
  • 8.Conclusion
  • References
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