President Erdoğan, President Trump (2019) | TPYXA_ILLUSTRATION / Shutterstock
In 2002, voters in Turkey—reeling from an economic crisis that halved the value of the Turkish lira and produced a 7.5 percent drop in GDP—elected a new party by a plurality: 34.3 percent of the vote.
Though hardly a resounding mandate, the margin enabled the party, an Islamist offshoot led by charismatic former Istanbul mayor Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to form a new government.
What was curious about the election was that the new party had almost no coherent, discernible economic program. Full of pro-business promises, its election manifesto also featured a pledge to stand up to the IMF and the EU for Turkey’s interests. A Turkey-first stance, if you will. In addition to the orthodox economic rhetoric, the party’s manifesto made a variety of populist promises: to give cash support to farmers, to raise wages and pensions for civil servants, and to provide tax amnesty.
But strangest of all was the rout of Turkey’s political establishment: All three members of the outgoing coalition government achieved less than 10 percent of the vote, with coalition leader Democratic Left setting a “world record” in vote loss with just 1.2 percent of the final tally— and failing to secure a single parliamentary seat. Blaming the Democratic Left’s austere 40-year political veteran Bulent Ecevit for runaway inflation and failing to secure Turkey’s interests internationally, voters consigned his party to the dustbin of history. One irate citizen, a florist, even lobbed his cash register directly at the prime minister while the latter was on tour.
Is any of this starting to sound familiar? It should.
During the twentieth century, large left-wing parties developed around the world to represent working people and the democratic masses. But in Turkey, as in the United States, things began to change in the left and center of politics. By the 1990s, Turkey’s social democratic party, like the American Democratic Party under Bill Clinton, enjoyed the growing support of urban, college-educated professionals, while non-college-educated and rural voters began to move to the right.
One sociological perspective on how political representation works relies on the insight that voters carry with them a number of latent identities, but these identities must be activated, or articulated, to become a political affiliation. Parties succeed if they speak persuasively to voters, drawing a connection between their picture of reality and what voters feel their grievances to be. With the changes inside the Democratic party and the loss of unions in the 1990s, the Democrats lost that power of articulation for many working people. This has been shown in a number of ways, including a decline in turnout and shifts in voting patterns. In Turkey, lost articulation was showcased through mercurial voting and party splintering. Elections in the 1990s produced shaky coalition governments when no party could win a plurality. Turkey had entered negotiations for EU accession, and the perceived mistreatment and top-down condescension by EU officials—who required substantial harmonization reforms in the form of constitutional amendments affecting many areas of political and cultural life—fueled voter frustration: Who was Europe to champion democratic ideals while dictating the content of national policies for others?
In the mid-twentieth century, with European fascism fresh in the collective memory, economic historian Karl Polanyi theorized that when people are pushed to the edge of survival by free market policies, the political consequences are unpredictable. A contemporary political sociologist, Stephanie Mudge, calls such moments of instability and political openness “Polanyian moments”: when what is sayable, thinkable, and doable by a political party is blown wide open.
Turkey’s Polanyian moment took place in 2001, when the value of the lira collapsed overnight. In the United States—the third most unequal country according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Turkey being the second-most unequal—the Polanyian moment arrived in 2008–2009, in the form of a financial crisis.
Combine a Polanyian moment with disarticulation, and you go a long way toward explaining current politics in both Turkey and the United States.
And if we look at Turkey since Erdoğan’s rise to power, we also may see a preview of one way America’s political future may unfold.
In Turkey, pundits first saw the victory of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, commonly referred to as AKP) as a head-scratching fluke—not unlike Trump’s victory in 2016.
But right wing ethno-nationalism in Turkey has proven to be anything but a political aberration.
From 34.3 percent of the vote in 2002 (the country’s first plurality in 15 years), AKP’s share of the vote rose to 46.6 percent in 2007, and to 49.8 percent in 2011. After temporarily losing its majority in the regular elections of 2015, the majority was restored—at 49.5 percent—during snap elections later that year, which took place against a backdrop of political violence.
Since transitioning the country to a presidential system in 2018, Erdoğan has continued to win elections—most recently, in 2023.
The party’s inaugural term was characterized by more-or-less adherence to IMF demands and the pursuit of EU harmonization reforms, with a few populist nods thrown in. While many secularist commentators in Turkey were suspicious of the party’s “reformism” from the start, pointing out that retrenchment of labor rights and environmental protections began soon after the party took office, early AKP enthusiasm for EU harmonization staved off initial concerns for many in the West. Implementation of European Union—mandated political reforms earned the party international praise.
At the same time, changes to two constitutional articles—approved the year before AKP took power and supported in parliament by its forebear, the Islamist Virtue party—made it more difficult for the Constitutional Court to rule out political parties whose programs or activities were seen as a democratic threat. The amendments to Articles 69 and 149 raised the required court majority from simple to three-fifths, increased the standard of evidence, and introduced a graduated system of punishment that gave the court discretion to slap a party on the wrist by depriving it of public funding before banning it outright.
Such changes reduced the ability of the Constitutional Court to regulate political conduct. They were decisive in saving AKP in 2008, when a simple majority of the court found that the party had indeed violated secular and democratic norms but failed to muster the supermajority to ban it. Motivated not by plausible EU accession but by the instrumentality of such reforms to its majoritarian aims, AKP capitalized on the broad popularity of sidelining the old political establishment to push through other measures, ones that redrew lines of power to suit the party’s interests.
A key move came in 2010, when Erdoğan’s government sponsored a popular referendum on judicial reforms, which consisted of measures increasing parliamentary (that is, elected) control over appointments to the Constitutional Court, and expanding the influence of lower courts, which AKP’s conservative allies had already penetrated through appointing members to the High Council of Judges and Prosecutors.
Invocation of democracy over antidemocratic powers that would block the people’s will formed a large part of Erdoğan’s discourse around these activities. The same theme is recognizable in Trumpian rhetoric on a vast array of issues, including criticizing Democrats for Kamala Harris’s non-primaried nomination.
In the summer of 2013, after AKP had been in power for nearly a decade, mass protests erupted throughout Turkey, sparked by the government’s plans to raze a beloved Istanbul park. A progressive movement was crystallized by these protests—led, significantly, not by the inheritor to Ecevit’s party but in the country’s progressive Kurdish party tradition. The People’s Democratic Party (HDP) represented a coalition of trade unions, environmentalists, feminist and LGBTQ groups, and youth, which it added to its core constituency of Kurdish voters.
In the 2015 elections, HDP won 12 percent of the vote, a large share for a Kurdish party.
Erdoğan and his party responded ruthlessly. Early steps toward a peace process with Kurdish guerillas were abandoned and a new military crackdown in Turkey’s Southeast , enabled by the renewal of state of emergency zones and curfews, provided cover to state violence.
Meanwhile, in response to a corruption investigation implicating party high-ups that began in December 2013, AKP tightened its grip on power. Members of the Gülen movement, the party’s erstwhile Islamic allies in the police and judiciary, hit back at the investigation with a spat of dismissals of police and prosecutors.
Losing its majority in the June 2015 elections, in part to gains by both HGP and a far-right nationalist party, AKP refused to form a coalition and instead called snap elections for November. At the same time, it commenced a campaign of intimidation against political opponents while inciting nationalist fears among voters.
Returning with a renewed majority in November, AKP still lacked the supermajority required to implement constitutional changes that would increase executive power. It found the perfect opportunity soon after: A failed coup in 2016, the result of internecine drama between AKP and its former Gülen allies, producing a new wave of arrests, purges of the bureaucracies, and imprisonments. Images of Erdoğan supporters in the streets, defending their beloved leader, look strikingly like those of pro-Trump insurgents on January 6, 2020. In the coup attempt’s wake, the Turkish government placed the country under a state of emergency rule while carrying out unprecedented purges of bureaucracies, academia, and numerous other sectors.
In the context of parliamentary democracy’s suspension, Erdoğan used the tool of voter referendum to overhaul democracy itself. A successful April 2017 referendum created an all-powerful “executive presidency,” granting Erdoğan the ability to issue decrees which have the force of law, eliminating both legislative and judicial independence.
Taken together, Erdoğan’s purge of the bureaucracy, reorganization of the courts, strengthening of the presidency, and language justifying majority rule all evoke Trump and his avowed plans for transforming the American regime.
Trump’s offhand remarks about a third term have prompted one House member to draft a resolution clarifying the intent of the Twenty-Second Amendment. Erdoğan—who once mused that “democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to your stop, you get off”—is also allegedly mulling options for staying in power once his constitutionally defined two-term limit as president is up.
