5.4.1 Emergent Euro-skepticism

Quite soon, however, contextual, ideational, and agential forces aligned to take the wind out of Turkey’s EU sails. At the systemic level, the September 11 attacks by Al Qaeda took the world by surprise, unleashing the US-led “War on Terror” in Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond. While for friends of Turkey internationally, Islamist extremism only made “moderate” Turkey’s democratization and European integration more compelling, the post-9/11 zeitgeist percolated with anxieties about Muslims in the West. In tandem with the overhaul of national security frameworks and profiling of Muslim Europeans, the EU’s willingness to absorb a large Muslim-majority state was dampened by jihadist subway bombings in Madrid (2004) and London (2005). In Holland, a filmmaker who criticized Islam was assassinated; in Denmark, cartoons caricaturing the Prophet sparked worldwide protests; in France, migrant neighborhoods rioted after the deaths of two youths at the hands of the police – a three-week period during which 8,000 vehicles were burned and 2,760 people arrested.Footnote ³⁸ The fiery spectacle’s root cause was arguably systemic racism. But it provided an opportunity for politicians like then interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy to convert anti-immigrant rhetoric into a successful bid for France’s presidency.

In this context, Turkey-skeptic figures such as Valéry Giscard D’Estaing, a prominent French statesman, argued that the country was “too different” civilizationally for membership. In so doing, he said aloud what many conservative policymakers and publics were thinking across the Union. And while the comment was made in an individual rather than institutional capacity, D’Estaing went on to serve as President on the Convention on the Future of Europe. Participants in the Convention were tasked with helping to draft a European Constitution.Footnote ³⁹ Hot debate ensued as to whether a reference to “Christianity” should be included in the document’s preamble. No such terminology made it into the final draft. Yet, French and Dutch voters proved skeptical of European integration, rejecting the constitutional project in key referenda in 2005. Symptomatic of Euro-skepticism in general, some analysts of the referenda saw a link with Turkey’s controversial candidacy. Reticence on Turkey’s accession was likewise signaled by Germany’s new Christian Democrat leader, Angela Merkel, who argued for a “privileged partnership” in lieu of full EU membership. The frame recalled nineteenth-century designations of Ottoman Turkey as a second-class, “semi-civilized” state within the European-dominated international system.Footnote ⁴⁰ By the mid-2000s then, there was ample evidence that Turkey’s EU accession would be a steep, uphill battle, at best.

As culturalist visions of Europe gained traction, advocates of a cosmopolitan, post-national EU who had helped Turkey to secure candidate status back in 1999 were sidelined. The argument had been that if and when Turkey met the EU’s political criteria for accession, multicultural Europe would be strengthened by Turkey’s inclusion.Footnote ⁴¹ Diminished support for the cosmopolitan vision of Europe provided cover, in turn, for Turkey skeptics within what Tocci calls the “Rubiks cube” of EU policymaking with its complex, interlocked, and evolving stakeholders and factions.Footnote ⁴²

A critical turning point in negotiations was the 2006 decision to freeze eight accession chapters shortly after they had been opened. The trigger was Ankara’s refusal to sign an additional protocol recognizing EU member Cyprus – a necessary step if Turkey’s candidacy was to advance. Turkey’s resistance was animated by anger at the Union’s disregard for its own accession criteria vis-à-vis Cyprus (since the rules state that no country with an outstanding internal conflict can join the Union). Brussels nevertheless had accepted Nicosia to prevent Athens from vetoing the accession of ten Central and Eastern European states during a massive 2004 enlargement. For Turkey, the EU decision to move forward with Cypriot accession was loaded with double standards. This was because only a week before joining, over 75 percent of the island’s Greek Cypriot majority had voted at the behest of their hardline president to reject a UN-mediated resolution of the island’s long-standing conflict. Around two thirds of Turkish Cypriots, by way of contrast, had voted for the plan. The upshot was permanent division of the island and evaporation of any incentive for the Greek Cypriot Nicosia to work with the Turkish Cypriot community. This outcome was a slap in the face of the AKP, who, until the Cypriot vote and accession, appeared to give credence to the “transformative power of” EU “integration,”Footnote ⁴³ lending its support to the UN-brokered plan.

These developments engendered a key emergent property: a growing sense across Turkey’s otherwise divided political spectrum that the EU beacon for pluralism was tarnished by double standards and racism.Footnote ⁴⁴ The impact on the AKP and its coalition was palpable. In the next section, I offer a window onto critical episodes in the process of disenchantment with EU-niversalism, especially on the “Islamo-” side of the Islamo-liberal spectrum: ECtHR verdicts upholding a post-1980 ban on veiling in public institutions.

5.4.2 Sunni Majority Rights: Freedom of Religion and the Headscarf Ban

On June 29, 2004, and again on November 10, 2005, the ECtHR ruled in favor of the Turkish state’s post-1980 ban on veiling in public institutions. At stake was freedom of religion – one of the earliest principles in the “EU-universal” rights canon. The norm emerged in response to the early modern wars of religion as a modus vivendi for rival Christian sects. In time, tolerance encompassed, at least in principle, adherents of any religion (or none). Widely enshrined in international law, Article 9 of the ECHR defines it as the right to manifest one’s “religion or belief in worship, teaching, practice and observance” either “alone or in community with others and in public or private….” However, limitations may be reasonable in the service of “public order, health or morals, or the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.” This qualification means that there is little consensus on the substance of freedom of religion, because, in practice, its exercise may conflict with other freedoms such as equality.

This tension was at play in the headscarf debate since veiling can be read as a religious duty that, in accordance with human rights law, pious citizens must be allowed to exercise “in public or private.” Veiled activists, for their part, also argued that the practice is empowering. It allowed, they argued, a conservative woman to navigate public spaces from mass transportation to the workplace while preserving her role as the embodiment of family “honor” (namus) via the act of covering. While veiling is not explicitly prescribed in Islamic scripture, it is customary in all Muslim societies. Well before the AKP, Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) had described veiling as a religious duty. For example, its chief stated in 1998 that “[t]he Turkish citizen should not be left face-to-face with a need to make a serious choice between the commands of God or the principles of Atatürk.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Turkey’s founders, however, strongly discouraged veiling. The uncovered, European appearance of the ideal republican woman signaled the Westernist march toward “contemporary civilization.” Over time, this image was internalized by many urban women across class lines. It found uptake, moreover, on a regional basis (e.g., in the western parts of Turkey such as eastern Thrace as well as the cities along the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts). Furthermore, women from communities across Anatolia such as heterodox Alevis are traditionally less likely to cover for religious reasons.Footnote ⁴⁶

With mass migration to the cities in the second half of the twentieth century, newly urban pious women began to challenge the unveiled ideal, adopting a modern version of the headscarf (türban).Footnote ⁴⁷ As veiled women became bolder,Footnote ⁴⁸ the state became stricter. Following the 1980 coup, public employees and students affiliated with public universities were banned from veiling. The law spent a decade in court, with prominent generals coming down strongly in favor of the ban. In 1991, the Constitutional Court ruled that freedom to wear a “costume of choice” did not apply to the headscarf. Pro-veiling constituencies read this ruling as a violation of their rights and religiosity.

Advocates of the ban, for their part, believed that it safeguarded secularity in public life. Veiling, they argued, was a socially constructed practice that is repressive to women who are pressured to cover. Pro-religious women’s claim that it empowers was read as internalized oppression. Seen through this prism of communitarian pressure, the headscarf also can be construed as a threat to social diversity more broadly. This is because veiling is an article of (customary) Islamic law that blurs the boundary between the public and the private, potentially authorizing further limits to individuals’ right of dissent.Footnote ⁴⁹ In this account, the headscarf activates what Dalacoura calls the “tragedy of the liberal.”Footnote ⁵⁰ This is a situation in which a democratic state either (i) suppresses a potentially illiberal practice pursued in the name of freedom (e.g., of religion and/or expression) and thereby becomes tyrannical or (ii) allows the practice and endangers the rights of other citizens and, ultimately, democracy itself. Turkey’s dilemma was all the more intense because the religious group in question was a majority, not a minority of the population. As such, the debate spoke not only to freedom of religion and expression in relation to public spaces but also to individuals’ – and women’s – self-determination in a conservative society.

These arguments notwithstanding, the ECtHR rulings surprised many in the AKP camp.Footnote ⁵¹ After all, since Islamists turned to EU-niversal values in response to the 1997 “post-modern coup,” pro-religious punditry had characterized the ban as a human rights problem and looked to Europe as the solution. Thus, when Leyla Şahin – a medical student whose education in Turkey had been impeded by the measure – launched the freedom of religion case against Turkey, many believed a ruling in her favor would help to overturn the ban.

However, ECtHR jurisprudence (like that of the US Supreme Court) is uneven on questions of freedom of religion and had never found in favor of a Turkish/Muslim plaintiff’s challenge to secular institutions. Ultimately, the Court ruled against Şahin. The ruling declared that there was no violation of freedom of religion, conscience, or thought, nor of the plaintiff’s right of access to education, respect for private and family life, and right to freedom from discrimination.

Kemalists rejoiced at the outcome. Reading the verdicts as affirming that the headscarf posed a semiotic and concrete challenge to the secular, democratic regime, prominent figures such as President Sezer and the chairman of the Board of Higher Education asserted (misleadingly) that the headscarf ban was now irrevocable.Footnote ⁵²

Unsurprisingly, the outcomes disappointed pro-religious civil society. Leaders and pundits decried the Court’s statement that the ban was “appropriate in the Turkish context,”Footnote ⁵³ lambasting the ruling as “irrational,”Footnote ⁵⁴ “political,”Footnote ⁵⁵ “subjective,”Footnote ⁵⁶ and “misinformed.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Accusing the ECtHR of abetting authoritarianism, of “two-facedness”Footnote ⁵⁸ and of “deep-rooted fear of Islam,”Footnote ⁵⁹ the rulings were said to reveal “profound double standards” toward Turkey’s Sunni Muslim majority given European actors’ ample support for the rights of Turkey’s Christian, Kurdish, and Alevi minorities.Footnote ⁶⁰ The upshot was that “thousands” had lost faith in “European justice;”Footnote ⁶¹ “Human rights, freedom of thought, and democracy” might still have intrinsic value. But “Europe” used these “myths” to legitimize its material interests and “psychological hegemony over non-Western societies.”Footnote ⁶² For prominent Islamist intellectual Ali Bulaç – who had turned tentatively toward EU-niversal inspiration and Islamo-liberalism in the early 2000s – the rulings were deal-breaking. Ultimately, he declared “European justice” and Kemalism were peas in a pod: “totalitarian bids to annihilate alternative ways of life.”Footnote ⁶³

The verdicts vindicated Islamists who had been skeptical of the EU gambit. As Akif Emre, another prominent thinker who was well versed in European social and political theory, put it, attempts to separate a sort of Habermasian public sphere regulated by European-cum-universal values and an Islamic private sphere were doomed to fail. The Court had affirmed the ban precisely because Islamists had sought to defend veiling in the language of rights and freedoms rather than in their own terms. Yet, veiling is not a freedom, he argued, it is a form of worship:

This default to a position of cultural incompatibility resonated, however, with right-wing nationalists, who tended to have a higher tolerance for Sunni activism than Kemalist nationalists. Criticizing Kemalist triumphalism as divisive,Footnote ⁶⁵ they jumped at the opportunity to discredit the EU, declaring that sooner or later, the Muslim citizens of a 99 percent Muslim country would have justice.Footnote ⁶⁶ MHP behavior, in this regard, revealed an important tension that would impact major political outcomes over the course of the decade. This tension emanated from MHP’s attempt to straddle the secularist concerns of Kemalist incumbents within the state apparatus on the one hand and, on the other, the pro-Sunni concerns of an AKP that was maneuvering nimbly to penetrate the state. After all, if the AKP were to abandon the “-liberal” component of its Islamo-liberal platform, its line would converge at least as much with the MHP’s Turco-Muslim nationalism as the MHP overlapped with Kemalist ethno-nationalists. This calculus helps to explain the MHP’s flip-flop between its support for EU-oriented reforms as part of a Kemalist-dominated coalition in the 2000s, and its support for the AKP over a series of key junctures in the party’s mounting struggle to penetrate the state.

Liberals, for their part, tried to assuage pro-religious disappointment. They did so by expressing solidarity in the language of political and religious pluralism. As one columnist put it, the ruling defied the Court’s very purpose: protection of the Other in a pluralist global society.Footnote ⁶⁷ The rulings cost religious women without the resources to study abroad an education (while posing no such obstacle to publicly pious men).Footnote ⁶⁸ Fear of the headscarf was part and parcel of a broader culture of fear according to which “if we give in any more, we’ll be dismembered … or they’ll force us to cover,”Footnote ⁶⁹ an attitude said to counter-productively fuel resentment among pro-religious citizens.Footnote ⁷⁰ Recognizing, moreover, the disillusionment that the verdicts had produced, prominent liberals worried that having “fetishized Europe and European institutions”Footnote ⁷¹ in recent years, Islamist disappointment would lead to rejection of the European rights project as a whole.Footnote ⁷²

Sympathy notwithstanding, the rulings also drew out the fact that differentiated readings of religious rights were a real challenge for the Islamo-liberal coalition. Liberal concern about the impact of mounting conservative majoritarianism on unveiled women was captured by Şerif Mardin’s intervention when he coined the term mahalle baskısı or “neighborhood pressure,” to flag the dilemmas that nonpracticing women might experience regarding veiling.Footnote ⁷³ As another prominent liberal put it, “[o]n one hand seventeen-year-olds want to study and express themselves; on the other, when I look at them, I see a uniform, a political identity, an Islamic symbol.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Moving forward, this tension would take a toll on the Islamo-liberal alliance – and bring the AKP and MHP closer.

5.6.1 The Ergenekon and Balyoz Trials

In a dramatic new development following Dink’s death, defenders of the unitary status quo were hauled before the courts. A first wave of arrests in 2007 saw prosecutors imprison dozens of prominent right-wing nationalists and Kemalist hardliners. Their ranks included figures who had lambasted Pamuk, Şafak, and Dink. Widening waves engulfed hundreds of military officers, politicians, and public intellectuals. Charged with membership to “Ergenekon” – an alleged deep state formation inspired by extreme nationalism – the accused were said to be responsible for Dink’s murder, among other conspiracies.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

As the trials unfolded, significant errors and discrepancies surfaced in the indictments.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Observers inside and outside the country began to raise red flags. Some liberals, however, received the news with ambivalence (and perhaps some schadenfreude). After years of judicial impunity, figures associated with a “deep state” that had long targeted liberals, leftists, and their allies within non-Muslim and Kurdish civil society were facing trial. Given the premium, moreover, that liberals placed on religious and ethnic pluralism – a topic on which the AKP of this period was decidedly less allergic than the nationalist-secularist establishment – some, if by no means all, adopted a “wait-and-see” approach.

Moderate Kemalists, however, were as perturbed by the trials as their hardline co-ideologists. Ergenekon, as such, marked a moment when the dangers of democratic backsliding became visible to a wider, pro-secular constituency. In principle, many sympathized with the defendants, especially officers and journalists caught up in the expansive trial, whose careers and lives were shattered by the deeply flawed process.Footnote ¹¹¹ At another self-interested, indeed existential level, the Ergenekon affair revealed that nationalist-secularist stewardship of the state was under serious siege. Thus, the challenge to political pluralism that was brewing in this period was especially clear to Kemalist cadres.

6.2.1 Initial Conditions

The early 2010s were marked by a global economic meltdown and its intense manifestation in the Eurozone. These initial conditions canceled any prospects for swift Turkish accession to the EU. With the US likewise reeling economically, prospects for transatlantic trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) were uncertain. Given that AKP electoral success correlated with delivering growth, Turkey sought to enhance trade and diplomatic relations with the Balkans, Caucasus, and the Middle East.Footnote ²

Economic drama notwithstanding, on balance, the AKP could claim effective economic governance during this period. It had achieved impressive growth by building upon structural reforms implemented by Kemal Derviş, a World Bank technocrat, after the 2001 economic crisis. These included banking sector reforms that enabled Turkey to weather with relative ease the world-wide crisis in the late 2000s. Achieving average annual growth rates of 7.2 percent between 2002 and 2007,Footnote ³ it rebounded from the global recession with almost 8.5 percent growth in 2010 and over 11 percent in 2011.Footnote ⁴ This performance situated Turkey in the same growth ballpark as China. Rising rapidly up the Group of Twenty (G20), it began to be cited as an emerging economic power in the same sentence, albeit not of the same magnitude, as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). In 2008, moreover, Ankara signaled that it was poised to pay off all remaining IMF debts, a goal achieved in 2013.

The impact at home was palpable. Per capita income adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP) rose considerably,Footnote ⁵ as the country soaked up eight times more FDI under the AKP than it had in the previous eighty years combined.Footnote ⁶ The (hyper)inflationary lira was reduced to single-digit growth. Long-strained social services were modernized. And national infrastructure was overhauled, transforming cityscapes and rural areas alike with new bridges, tunnels, hospitals, highways, and airports.

In terms of actors, many experiencing this transformation felt the country was approaching its foundational republican ideal of industrial-capitalist modernity.Footnote ⁷ The AKP base, in particular, celebrated economic performance as fusing material success with cultural authenticity. Millions of formerly “peripheral” economic actors had become middle class, as the pro-religious bourgeoisie prospered. A common refrain in these groups was that the AKP had achieved more for the ordinary person in a decade than the old establishment since the country’s foundation. And while the overhaul was neoliberal in thrust, generating losers as well as winners, the AKP redistributed benefits to core constituents (especially before elections). The approach meshed with the social conservativism of AKP supporters. As Kaya puts it,Footnote ⁸ the neoliberal expectation that citizens “prudentially” generate services once offered by the welfare state was compatible with traditional expectations of family and community economic management.

Nevertheless, the pains of neoliberal restructuring were called out by voices within and outside the pro-religious coalition. Islamic critics expressed concern at capitalism’s ethical impact, citing rampant corruption and unbridled consumerism. On the left, concerns included environmental degradation, worker’s rights, and the exclusions produced by neoliberal education and gentrification, especially given the linkage between neoliberal economic and conservative social agendas.

The CHP, now definitively in the opposition, positioned to harness such sentiments by selecting a new leader when hardliner Deniz Baykal was ousted in a sex scandal. Under the mild-mannered but determined Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the party began sliding from a nationalist–secularist to a more social democratic repertoire. The shift, while cautious, had the potential to resonate with a generation who had come of age under – but felt increasingly stifled by – the AKP.

6.2.2 Minority “Openings”

Against this backdrop, Erdoğan moved to consolidate the AKP’s hold on power – and his hold on the party – in the face of critics from beyond but also within the party coalition. Having successfully run the gauntlet of the Constitutional Court closure case, the party launched a call for democratic consolidation referencing the Sunni-Turkish majority, but also ethnic and religious minorities. “Opening” (açılım ) toward electorally significant Kurds was the most pronounced and is covered in Chapter 7.

Meanwhile, the party reached out to non-Muslims and non-Sunni Alevis, marking a “radical break with previous state policies.”Footnote ⁹ A combination of EU norms and Ottoman-Islamic referents invoking multiculturalism and tolerance furnished frames for engagement. Actions included the restoration and reopening of non-Muslim sites that had been neglected under nationalist–secularist hegemony.Footnote ¹⁰

Engagement was welcomed by figures such as Laki Vingas, a leader of Turkey’s Rum (Greek) community. Similarly, Turkish-Armenian intellectuals Markar Esayan and Etyen Mahçupyan would go on to pursue high-level political roles: the former as an AKP parliamentarian, the latter as advisor to Ahmet Davutoğlu, who served as both Foreign Minister and Prime Minister in the 2010s. Mahçupyan, for one, believed that conservative cadres’ own experience of repression had catalyzed an appreciation for political and religious pluralism.Footnote ¹¹ The possibility that an AKP-led state and society might be more receptive to recognizing the events of 1915 as genocide also may have informed Esayan and Mahçupyan’s pro-AKP orientation.Footnote ¹²

Other non-Muslim commentators, however, expressed concern that conservatives’ “alternative modernity” in general, and the AKP minority “openings” in particular, had not transformed entrenched, anti-minority practices in state and society. These persisted, critics pointed out, in the paternalistic and communitarian logic of neo-Ottoman frames for pluralism. Celebration of past cohabitation, moreover, could not erase contemporary challenges. For example, in a context of deteriorating, bilateral relations with Israel (see below), Turkey’s small Jewish community was sensitive to surging, societal anti-Semitism. This trend was evident in the brisk sales of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which in 2005 had sold 100,000 copies in only two months – equivalent to four copies per member of the country’s circa 25,000-member community.Footnote ¹³

Finally, despite the AKP’s pro-Sunni orientation, high-ranking officials engaged a number of heterodox Alevi congregations. Alevism, which emerged in Anatolia in the thirteenth century and whose adherents today are said to number between 15 and 20 million, synthesizes folk practices with veneration of Prophet Ali in the Shi’a Islamic tradition.Footnote ¹⁴ Viewed as heterodox or blasphemous by many Orthodox Sunnis, Alevis were intermittently persecuted by the Ottomans who feared that they might align with the Shi’a Shahs of Persia. As a result, during the republican period, Alevis supported secularism, eventually becoming a reliable source of support for the CHP. Radical Alevi youth also participated in left-wing movements and clashed with right-wing counterparts in the buildup to the 1980 coup. With the postcoup advent of the Turkish-Islamic synthesis in the 1980s and the rise of pro-Sunni political forces since the 1990s, secular leftist Alevi anxieties mounted.Footnote ¹⁵

Official gestures to Alevis in the early 2010s had little precedent. Referencing Ali, the successor of the Prophet Mohammed whose assassination led to schism between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims, Erdoğan declared, “if being Alevi is to love Ali, then I am a consummate Alevi.”Footnote ¹⁶ Erdoğan went on to offer a public apology for the state’s massacre of rebellious Alevi Kurds in Dersim in 1937–1938 – a tragedy that had cemented early republican policies of zero tolerance for ethnic or religious agitation. The AKP approach failed, however, to charm all Alevis given persistent problems such as impunity for the Islamist perpetrators of more recent massacres and ongoing Sunnification of school curricula.Footnote ¹⁷ The new curriculum was especially problematic for working-class Alevi communities who many had little choice but to send children to public schools. As a result, many read the Dersim apology as a superficial and instrumental attempt to belittle the CHP whose new leader, Kılıçdaroğlu, was of Alevi origin. Critics further noted that the government only engaged select Alevi groups, avoiding left-leaning associations.Footnote ¹⁸ In the case of Alevis (and Kurds), this omission meant missing significant segments of the community.Footnote ¹⁹ And, as with non-Muslims, the paternalistic framing of openings in the idiom of Ottoman-Islamic tolerance simultaneously evoked Sunni primacy. In other words, while the language of “opening” was new – and the breadth and depth of public debate about minority inclusion unprecedented – many Alevis saw as much continuity as change.Footnote ²⁰ This impression was amplified when the AKP jumped into the sectarian fray of greater Middle Eastern politics in the context of the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings and their aftermath.

6.2.3 Constitutional Referendum

In the same period – and similarly espousing but not necessarily living up to pluralistic principles – the government mobilized for constitutional reform. Calling for a nationwide referendum, amendments were drawn up behind closed doors. Prominent liberals such as constitutional law expert Ergun Özbudun were invited, nevertheless, to contribute, lending the process an aura of inclusivity. The amendments eventually presented to the public appeared broadly compatible with the EU-niversalist agenda. Among the issues addressed were equality before the law for vulnerable individuals and groups; the right to privacy; freedom of movement; children’s protection; labor’s right to organize; the right to petition the government via a new ombudsman; and the abolition of special military courts. Prosecution of National Security Council members and technocrats who had served in the context of the 1980 coup would become possible. Billboards across the country urged citizens to vote “yes” to these “European” benchmarks in all arenas from retirement benefits to civil–military relations. The choice of September 12th as the date for the poll was symbolic, marking the twentieth anniversary of the 1980 coup and its constitutional legacy.

The proposals were endorsed by dozens of prominent liberals who hankered to see the piecemeal reforms of previous years consolidated. Mobilizing around the slogan “not enough, but yes” (yetmez, ama evet), writers, scholars, and activists flagged their support, while also registering concern at democratic backsliding. The fact that several of these figures championed – or hailed from – religious or ethnic minorities suggests that the AKP’s “openings” had proved at least partially persuasive.

However, if the campaign persuaded some voters, it arguably generated even greater resistance – as much if not more, in fact, than the government’s “yes” campaign. Some Islamist commentators were irritated by the “not enough” – component.Footnote ²¹ Nationalist secularists on the right and left alike decried the campaign as treason: a nefarious betrayal of secularism and the Republic. Finally, a growing group who initially had given the AKP the benefit of the doubt worried that the yetmez, ama evet argument was naïve. The amendments, it was feared, were a Trojan horse that would enable Erdoğan to stack the judiciary, among other key institutions.Footnote ²²

Specifically, the revised document transformed the method of judicial appointments, review, and the structure of the Supreme Council of Judges and Prosecutors, as well as the Supreme Court. The total number of judges on the Supreme Court bench would increase by six, each to serve twelve-year terms. Raising the overall number of judges from eleven to seventeen, justices would be nominated by the parliament and president. The prime minister and other cabinet ministers would participate in a new, two-chamber judicial assembly. Since sensitive cases such as party-closure proceedings would be tried in this assembly, the principle of judicial independence was potentially compromised. Given this concerted restructuring of the judiciary, but rather haphazard coverage of other issues, opponents worried, in short, that package would allow court capture, compromising checks and balances, and rule of law.

6.2.4 Taming the Military and Media

The courts along with the army had been the last institutional bastions of tutelary Kemalism. Now, both were under siege via referendum and trial, respectively. As shown in Chapter 5, the Ergenekon proceedings were read initially by a number of liberals as an attempt to dismantle the “deep state” – an alleged secret organization within the security apparatus that uses tools such as extra-judicial killings to defend the unitary national project.Footnote ²³ This hope was linked to demands for justice for slain Turkish-Armenian activist Hrant Dink – and thousands more who had been tortured or died under unexplained circumstances before and after the 1980 coup.

However, far from a site of accountability, Ergenekon and similar cases such as the Balyoz (“Sledgehammer”) trial soon came under scrutiny as inconsistencies in the prosecution percolated.Footnote ²⁴ The proceeding effectively purged some 500 figures from the military and other key sites such as university rectorships and opposition media.Footnote ²⁵ Critical observers such as Dani Rodrik declared that Turkey was turning into “a Middle Eastern version of Russia, with the media and courts increasingly becoming tools of political manipulation.”Footnote ²⁶

Rodrik’s reference to the media flagged another trend documented by Akser and Baybars-Hawks: growing intolerance of critical media.Footnote ²⁷ In contrast to the call for democratic consolidation – and a landmark 2007 statement on free speech when Erdoğan had pledged to respect his critics – pressure on the press mounted. A turning point was the attack on a media conglomerate, the Doğan Group, whose flagship publications were investigating claims of government corruption and fraud. Combining discursive and material tactics, Doğan was belittled as “their” not “our” media and slapped with a staggering fine amounting to billions of dollars.Footnote ²⁸ The tactics proved effective when Doğan shuttered some operations, ceding others to pro-government business. This pattern of intimidation and co-option would be repeated with other large media groups. Critical journalists were often dismissed in the process. Judicial and administrative mechanisms such as the Turkish Information and Communication Technology Authority were likewise used to discipline online criticism. And access to content from YouTube, Wikipedia, and other platforms was intermittently blocked.Footnote ²⁹

As critical media was suppressed, pro-government narratives became increasingly populist in thrust. Democracy was equated with only part of the demos, namely, the pious and hardworking everyman who, like Erdoğan, should soar in business and politics without forgetting his roots. Erdoğan’s people were contrasted with parasitic, culturally alienated, and inept “elites” (seçkinler) who sought to preserve the illiberal, post-1980 order. Claiming the mantle of charismatic, center-right “martyrs” for democracy – an almost archetypal persona personified in popular memory by the executed Menderes and prematurely dead Özal - Erdoğan positioned as the latest people’s champion. His calling: to risk all by taking on an oppressive system. In the context of constitutional debates, this framing enabled the equation of opposition criticism of the proposed reforms with a defense of military interference in politics.

The power of Erdoğan’s majoritarian populism – an Islamo-illiberal synthesis, as it were – was confirmed when the constitutional referendum passed with 58 percent of the vote. Then, in 2011, the AKP won national elections by almost 50 percent on a platform that likewise synthesized religious and EU-niversal referents in majoritarian idiom. Marking its third, national electoral victory since 2002, analysts began describing Turkey as a “predominant”Footnote ³⁰ or “dominant”Footnote ³¹ party system increasingly susceptible to “majoritarian drift.”Footnote ³² For more pluralist figures within the party, like Nihat Ergün (who at the time was serving as Minister of Industry and Technology), Erdoğan’s triumph in this period marked a tipping point: “Liberals” within and outside the party were sidelined as Erdoğan reprised: “the ideological line of the Milli Görüş … embrac[ing] its Islamic and communitarian character.”Footnote ³³

6.3.1 Historical Sources

With the ball now firmly in the AKP’s court, a second key property to emerge from pro-religious ascendence in the early 2010s was rehabilitation of the Ottoman past in collective memory. A central aspiration of pro-religious cadres since the Kemalist cultural revolution in the 1920s, neo-Ottomanism overlapped with elements of liberal/leftist revisionism in poetry, literature, and social science. This was because liberals and (liberal-)leftists similarly sought to overhaul a Kemalist imaginary that situated Turkey in a nationalist–secularist West, rather than a multicultural West or a postcolonial international (the latter two being projects to which Ottoman history also can be made to speak.) Especially as enthusiasm for Turkey’s EU trajectory cooled, neo-Ottomanism offered an alternative sense of pride and purpose.Footnote ³⁴

Twenty-first-century Neo-Ottomanism drew on a canon that, as suggested in Chapter 4, included poets who had expressed the sense of rupture that many in the early Republic had felt at the truncation of ties with the past. Iconic expressions of such anguish ranged from Nazim Hikmet’s communist cry from prison, “I long – from where, at where, to where…?” to Mehmet Akif Ersoy’s religious nationalist lament for a lost world whose memory was torment on earth.

Another figure who had witnessed the transition from empire to Republic – firebrand Necip Fazıl Kısakürek – was celebrated as the literary godfather of AKP-led Turkey. An adept of the Nakşibendi sect that engendered the Milli Görüş movement and Turkish political Islam, Kısakürek fused a Pirandello-esque modernism and quest for identity, with Occidentalist romanticism for the Ottoman-Islamic past. His tropes of Western decadence and renewal of the “Great East” via Islamic brotherhood featured prominently in Erdoğan’s populist performances. Yet, for all of Kısakürek’s penchant for authenticity, he imported anti-Semitic ideas from Europe that had no role in bona fide, late Ottoman-Islamist thought which, in fact, “saw similarities in the destiny of Muslims and Jews as the oppressed other of European Christians.”Footnote ³⁵

Nostalgia also was sourced via early republican authors such as Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar and Yahya Kemal, who shed enigmatic shadows and light on the multiethnic, multiconfessional Ottoman social fabric.Footnote ³⁶ Social scientific excavation of the Ottoman past offered further resources for revivalism. In the multiparty era, for example, historians such as Ömer Lütfi Barkan and Halil İnalcık, as well as Şerif Mardin – an intellectual historian, sociologist of religion, and political scientist – inspired generations of students to recover Ottoman history and Islamic subjectivities. Leftist academic revisionism likewise challenged Kemalist amnesia regarding the Ottoman period. The focus, however, was on economic history as a prism onto the challenges faced by Turkey to this day in a Western-dominated capitalist order. Left-leaning social historians likewise challenged Orientalist historiography by recovering the experiences of Ottoman peasants and slaves.Footnote ³⁷

Revisionist scholarship was amplified, in turn, by public figures. On the far right of the spectrum, Sheik Mehmet Zaid Kotku argued for the fusion of economic modernity with Ottoman-Islamic revival. As Milli Görüş spiritual leader and mentor to both the religious nationalist Necmettin Erbakan and Islamo-liberal Turgut Özal, he declared:

The agenda, albeit much diluted, acquired mainstream traction under the neo-Ottoman umbrella opened by Özal and his liberal/leftist advisors in the 1980s. The goal at the time: to foster an economically and politically liberal, but Islam-friendly state and society. In foreign policy terms, this neo-Ottoman vision had lent itself to a multiregional, if ultimately pro-Western orientation with Turkey envisaged as a pivotal rather than peripheral player. This vision was appropriated by an increasingly entrenched AKP.

6.3.2 The Neo-Ottoman Repertoire: An Expansive Pantheon

Pro-religious neo-Ottomanism was animated by the view that the rehabilitation of historical legacies was therapeutic for a society said to have been “force[d] through torture to forget” its heritage “and even [its] name and as a result lose all dignity.”Footnote ³⁸ Toward restoring this dignity, the AKP channeled cultural and economic resources toward neo-Ottoman revivalism. Deploying the toolkit of Hobsbawm and Ranger’s “invented tradition,”Footnote ³⁹ new holidays were proclaimed, monuments built, and symbols enshrined. In tandem with these efforts, nationalist–secularist iconography was downgraded.

This state-led strategy was accompanied by market efforts to commodify a lucrative Ottoman-Islamic heritage. The project was supported by secular liberal as well as pro-religious businesses and creatives. Products included nonfiction, novels, and an ever-growing selection of soap operas, movies, and consumables that fed popular “Ottomania.”Footnote ⁴⁰ These efforts were boosted by the work of popular professional and amateur historiansFootnote ⁴¹ who invited the public to revisit its knowledge (or lack thereof) of the Ottoman past through rose-colored lenses.Footnote ⁴²

As the 2010s unfolded, these efforts coalesced into a new, neo-Ottoman national storybook with a cast of characters that spanned the empire’s 700-year history. On the early side of the spectrum, the public was introduced to dynastic progenitor, Ertuğrul Gazi, via platforms such as a swashbuckling television series that followed early Turkic warriors’ expansion of Islam’s frontiers in Anatolia. Similarly, the rousing story of “Osman’s Dream” gained circulation. It invoked a vision said to have visited dynastic founder Osman as he reposed on a holy man’s couch. The dream foretold universal conquest, but also eventual world peace under Ottoman hegemony.Footnote ⁴³ Renderings of the vision were regularly featured in the sound-and-light productions that animated AKP rallies. Channeling neoimperial nostalgia toward populist mobilization,Footnote ⁴⁴ such displays sparked exhilaration in audiences at Turkey’s “once and future” imperial glory.

The golden days of imperial sway over three continents by the fifteenth century were likewise celebrated in narratives about Mehmet the Conqueror (r. 1444–1446; 1451–1481) and his fetih or conquest of Byzantine Constantinople in 1453. Exalted in elaborately choreographed municipal festivities staged for audiences of a million,Footnote ⁴⁵ the epic reached still wider audiences via a blockbuster film (Fetih 1453) that boasted the highest budget in Turkish cinematographic history. Mehmet’s battle conjured in the viewer a sense of once and future grandeur, flagging Muslim Turkey’s capacity to (benevolently) dominate its geography, even as the film also celebrated the religious militarism of both ordinary soldiers and dashing leaders.

Likewise lionized was the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent (r. 1520–1566) and his architect Sinan for giving Ottoman Istanbul its iconic horizon, among other legacies. Adding a neo-Ottoman silhouette to Istanbul’s Asian side, a massive new mosque project was launched that would transform the Bosphorus skyline. Attesting to the link between neo-Ottoman revival and neoliberal consumerism, that same skyline also was imprinted onto wide-ranging products from candelabra to subway tiles. Another “golden era” was the Tulip Period (1718–1730), an age of cohabitation with early modern Europe before Ottoman decline was widely felt. Remembered in the 2010s as a time of cultural achievement and harmony, “all things tulip” were marketed, including yet another municipal extravaganza: an annual, multimillion dollar tulip festival.

Furthermore, the fate of later Ottomans was revisited. A case in point was the attempt to exonerate the last sultan Mehmed VI Vahideddin. He had been vilified in Kemalist historiography as the embodiment of capitulation to occupying Allied forces, not least in Atatürk’s epic, 1927 speech Nutuk. As part and parcel of reestablishing continuity between empire and republic, pro-religious pundits reimagined Vahideddin as the tragic but noble embodiment of the Ottoman eclipse.Footnote ⁴⁶ Abdülhamid II received an even more generous reinvention (that is covered extensively in Chapter 8).

A host of other nonroyal persona were likewise paraded across the neo-Ottoman revival in public and commercial life, notably: Rumi – the great Sufi mystic; Evliya Çelebi – a traveler and chronicler of the Ottoman domains; and Yunus Emre – a medieval Anatolian Turkish poet whose name graced dozens of new Turkish language and cultural institutes opened in a surge of public diplomacy. With this rich set of characters and plotlines, the neo-Ottoman reimagination of public life offered pathways to pluralization and anti-pluralism alike.

6.3.3 Neo-Ottomanism as Multiculturalism

By the early 2010s, at least one strand of neo-Ottomanism emerged as compatible – if by no means identical – with EU-niversal readings of pluralism. Its emphasis was on Ottoman diversity which, in the words of the Islamist intellectual Akif Emre, was “a rare example in the world of a state that was multicultural, multiethnic, and multireligious.” For Emre, this pluralism had been battered by the equation of modernization with secularist nationalism in the twentieth century. But in a postmodern and global age, neo-Ottoman pluralism could be restored and therapeutic.Footnote ⁴⁷

Emre was one of many pro-religious intellectuals who viewed the Ottoman model as more inclusive in its very ontology than European multiculturalism. Recalling Islamist critique of the ECtHR rulings on religious freedom, they argued that Europeans had discovered tolerance only after centuries of intra-Christian carnage. And to this day, it was argued, “Europe” was unable to accommodate non-Christian difference. Ottoman multiculturalism, by way of contrast, was based on meaningful recognition of deep differences between the empire’s constituent religious communities. Elements of this view were corroborated by leading Ottoman historians in the West who, in keeping with historiographical trends that emphasize situated meaning-making practices, were seeking to understand Ottoman diversity on its own terms, rather than via Western concepts.Footnote ⁴⁸

To be sure, neo-Ottoman pluralism glossed over the legal and social primacy enjoyed by the Muslim millet over other religious groups. The frame nonetheless offered a sense of righteousness vis-à-vis a “Europe” that, by the early 2010s, was viewed across the political spectrum in Turkey as hypocritically reproducing historical double-standards toward Turkey and Muslims. In the Middle East, moreover, the neo-Ottoman argument for pluralism intrigued some as a possible pathway to an alternative but authentic modernity encompassing religious community. Such interest marked a departure from earlier critiques among many Arab Muslims of Kemalism’s mimetic Westernism.Footnote ⁴⁹

Liberals, for their part, were not entirely comfortable with Ottoman-Islamic dismantling of the Enlightenment rationale for pluralism. After all, by vaunting a multicommunitarian Ottoman past that privileged the largest group, the approach left little room for individual choice and freedom. Liberals nevertheless celebrated Ottoman diversity and sought to harness pro-religious enthusiasm for the past toward a pluralizing agenda for the present.

Rather than channel the glory days of empire, however, liberals focused on the long nineteenth century and, above all, the late Ottoman period – or what I have elsewhere called “Belle Époque neo-Ottomanism.”Footnote ⁵⁰ This frame recalled Istanbul/Constantinople’s long nineteenth-century role as a major node in the European-dominated system of maritime commerce. Economically, this temporal focus furnished a proto-capitalistic moment of flourishing civil society. Politically, it recalled the Tanzimat and Young Ottoman attempts to produce a transformative synthesis between Western and Ottoman-Islamic law and social practices. And demographically, Belle Époque neo-Ottomanism drew attention away from the exploits of warriors, rulers, and mystics – a hypermasculine cast of Sunni Muslim characters. Instead, the focus was on lost religious diversity: the Greek, Armenian, Jewish, and Levantine communities who formed the late Ottoman bourgeoisie.Footnote ⁵¹ This “memory work”Footnote ⁵² was supported by feminist scholarship that recovered the role played in late Ottoman civil society by the era’s dynamic women’s movement.Footnote ⁵³ The prism thus shed light on both a European-like heritage and homegrown diversity. However, as Örs points out, nostalgia problematically substituted celebration for a hard look at why religious minorities, by and large, had been erased.Footnote ⁵⁴

Liberal neo-Ottomanism nevertheless dovetailed with Ottoman-Islamic calls for multicultural and even post-national citizenship.Footnote ⁵⁵ This convergence was evident in joint support for neo-Ottoman policies such as municipal celebrations that, at least superficially, celebrated the city’s historic diversity. For example, publications sponsored by the municipality often featured pieces by liberal academics with titles such as “Istanbul: A City that has Always Owed its Existence to the Other.”Footnote ⁵⁶

Finally, Islamo-liberal cooperation under the rubric of neo-Ottomanism was widely on display in Istanbul, Turkey’s flagship city and a gateway to the former Ottoman geography. The engine of global Turkey’s economic growth and cultural traction, Istanbul ranked regularly within the top twenty-five list of the Global City Index.Footnote ⁵⁷ As an imperial hub for millennia, the world historic city exuded both liberal syncretism and Islamic authenticity. Its revitalization had long been a pro-religious project, especially for Erdoğan who began his career as Istanbul’s mayor.Footnote ⁵⁸ But Istanbul was also central to the imagination of secular liberal creatives such as Turkey’s first Nobel laureate, Orhan Pamuk, who had taken on nationalist–secularist orthodoxy on the Armenian question. Overlap in Islamo-liberal and secular liberal agendas arguably peaked with the 2010 Istanbul European City of Culture festivities. Much of the program’s 289 million Euro budget – 95 percent of which came from the AKP’s Ministry of FinanceFootnote ⁵⁹ – celebrated the city’s Ottoman-Islamic heritage, but also liberals’ Belle Époque cosmopolitanism. That being said, a member of the City of Culture board later reflected that among his colleagues, only those who channeled the year’s resources to Ottoman-Islamic reimagination of the city saw their careers advance.Footnote ⁶⁰ At the dawn of the 2010s, there also was growing consternation – especially on the “-left” side of liberal-left – at the careless repurposing of Belle Époque structures along, for instance, the historic İstiklal Caddesi (Rue de Pera/Pera Boulevard). As will be seen below, resistance to this neo-Ottoman commodification of urban spaces would mount as the decade unfolded.

6.3.4 Neo-Ottomanism as Sunni Majoritarianism

Pluralizing potential notwithstanding, the neo-Ottoman repertoire also was mobilized by anti-pluralist actors to champion Sunni Islamic primacy. An emergent expression of religious nationalism, this alternative neo-Ottoman project crystalized in conjunction with the general rehabilitation of Islam in public life.

The growing public salience of Sunni Islam was evident in a reshuffling of religious governance and education. The Directorate of Religious Affairs had expanded dramatically in less than a decade of AKP rule, employing some 120,000 people with a budget of circa $2 billion.Footnote ⁶¹ In the process, the Diyanet replaced the State Planning Organization of the Kemalist era as the launching pad for ambitious government careers. Religious holidays that had been muted under Kemalist hegemony also gained a salience. For example, festivities were organized around religious themes such as the “Sacred Birth Week” of the Prophet Mohammed.Footnote ⁶²

Similarly, religious instruction was amplified. Courses on the life of the Prophet were introduced into primary school curricula and compulsory religious education lowered from fourth to first grade. Kindergarten instructors were tasked with “teaching values” including “the concepts of paradise and hell” to imbue children with “love for Allah.”Footnote ⁶³ Pro-government teachers’ unions debated whether Ottoman language instruction should be introduced as an elective or even a mandatory offering. The secondary education system was overhauled to privilege conservative families seeking religious education. This left families who preferred to send their children to nonreligious schools with few and expensive choices. In this context, the İmam Hatip (theological) schools ballooned in size, number, and influence, registering a fivefold increase in student enrollment from 90,000 to 474,000 between 2004 and 2014. Legal measures were passed permitting graduates to pursue majors beyond theology in universities. This practice positioned religiously trained college graduates to penetrate the professions more broadly. The result, in pro-religious eyes, was the righting of a long-standing wrong. Others worried, however, that the relative rigor of republican secondary education system would be lost.

In higher education, too, theology curricula dropped the requirement that students take courses on sociology of religion and history of philosophy while leaving Islamic course requirements intact (e.g., Qur’anic exegesis [tafseer], Islamic jurisprudence [fiqh], and the sayings of the Prophet [hadith]). In response to the ruling, some theology professors expressed fear that graduates would lack “critical thinking,” or the “ability to grasp secular society,” opening them “to influence by the Wahhabi/Salafi strain of thought.”Footnote ⁶⁴

The rationale for curricular changes was articulated by Yusuf Kaplan, a prominent Islamist columnist. In an open letter to the government, Kaplan called for a return to Ottoman-Islamic sources of Turkish “greatness” and “demolition” of Westernized universities that used Enlightenment-derived pedagogy. Among the institutions Kaplan wished shuttered were Bilkent and Middle East Technical University which were among the only Turkish universities to perform competitively at a global scale. In their stead, Kaplan argued, Turkey should establish an “Islamic University” to rival Cairo’s Al-Azhar, and a “Qur’an University.”Footnote ⁶⁵

Another recurring theme was the celebration of militarism in service of Islam. This was evident, for one, in the swashbuckling narratives of (neo-)Ottoman heroism mentioned above. References to cihad (jihad) – a theological concept encompassing intellectual as well as military “struggle” – were embedded in textbooks. This fighting spirit was embraced by Erdoğan who was greeted like a rock star at domestic performances where crowds were prepped by rousing, Ottoman-style military bands (mehter takımı). Taking the stage, Erdoğan’s speeches invoked Ottoman-Islamic military exploits. He also embraced twentieth-century champions of their rehabilitation such as Ersoy and Kısakürek, both of whose poetry featured militarism. Thus, a more bombastic strand of neo-Ottoman populism coalesced in juxtaposition to pro-religious and pro-secular strands that emphasized multiculturalism.

This tension between neo-Ottoman pluralism and religious populism was on full display in Erdoğan’s “balcony” or acceptance speech following the 2011 elections. At one level, the script was among the most inclusionary the leader had delivered to date, invoking fraternity across ethnic groups whose very existence the nationalist–secularist establishment had long denied. It also signaled solidarity across diverse segments of society, including gestures to secularist cadres, figures, and concepts from Atatürk to “contemporary civilization.”

At the same time, the speech clearly celebrated an emergent geo-cultural imaginary that encompassed former Ottoman territories with special attention to places of pan-Islamist and pan-Turkic resonance. After saluting, “all the eyes turned towards Turkey” among “friendly and fraternal peoples” from Bagdad and Cairo to Baku and (Turkish Cypriot) Nicosia, Erdoğan declared that the “downtrodden” or “oppressed” of the world could rejoice (the term mazlum is redolent with religious significations). “Believe me, today, Sarajevo has won as much as Istanbul; Beirut has won as much as Izmir; the West Bank and Gaza have won as much as Diyarbakır. Today the Middle East, the Caucasus, and the Balkans have won as much as Turkey. Today peace, justice, and stability has won as much as democracy.” Reminiscent of Erbakan and the Milli Görüş conviction in Turkey’s manifest destiny to lead the Muslim-majority world, the frame envisaged a national project that was civilizationally distinct from and morally superior to Europe and the West.Footnote ⁶⁶

6.3.5 Neo-Ottomanism as Foreign Policy

The foreign policy projection of both pluralistic and hegemonic strands of neo-Ottoman revival with their respective emphasis on multiculturalism and public Islam also inflected the work of Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu. Davutoğlu had been a professor of international relations before entering politics. His early scholarship was a product of study and teaching in political Islamist milieus in Tunisia and Malaysia.Footnote ⁶⁷ For example, an early book challenged the “end of history” thesis of Frances Fukuyama who, after the Cold War, had argued that liberalism was now uncontested. Davutoğlu’s counterargument was that a revived Islamic civilization represented an “alternative for all humanity.”

His second book, Strategic Depth, gathered attention when Davutoğlu was appointed Erdoğan’s primary, foreign policy advisor. At one level, it channeled earlier arguments into an Islamo-liberal synthesis within the DP and Özal tradition. Turkey was envisaged as a mediator between “East” and “West” pursuing a culturally “authentic” version of the EU’s functionalist formula for international cooperation and prosperity. A sort of neo-Ottoman meets neo-Kantian imperative, it was hoped that the pursuit of “zero problems with neighbors,” that is, with Ottoman successor states, through trade and diplomacy would improve long-standing tensions.Footnote ⁶⁸ For example, and in contrast to habitual securitization of Kurdish regional energies, relations flourished with Iraqi Kurdistan where Turkish companies were highly active after the US-led invasion.Footnote ⁶⁹ Initial successes were read as positioning Turkey to become a (multi)regional mediator, updating the “bridge” trope for the twenty-first century.Footnote ⁷⁰ However, despite notable attempts at pluralizing diplomatic relations, including a brief rapprochement with Armenia to which Abdullah Gül contributed with “soccer diplomacy,”Footnote ⁷¹ the strategic approach fell short. Rather than infuse outreach with “democratic depth,”Footnote ⁷² Turkish foreign policy increasingly entailed a sectarian subtext with the focus on Sunni interlocutors across the Balkans, Caucasus, Middle East, and Africa.

Turkey’s foreign policy in this period was thus pliable.Footnote ⁷³ It enabled pragmatic engagement where neo-Ottoman overtures were unwelcome like Belgrade, Serbia or Yerevan, Armenia.Footnote ⁷⁴ But it also permitted the celebration of pan-Turkic connections (e.g., in outreach to Baku, Azerbaijan, and other Central Asian capitals) and pan-Islamist solidarities (e.g., in relations with the Middle East). The Middle East, in particular, attracted Davutoğlu and Erdoğan’s energies. Special attention was paid to wealthy and conservative Sunni states such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar that Ankara had been courting ever since relations with the EU had dipped in the late 2000s.

As sectarianism spilled into foreign policy, Davutoğlu’s “zero problems” policy with neighbors also was compromised. A case in point was relations with Israel. In the 1990s, pre-AKP Ankara had forged a strategic military partnership with Israel. Upon achieving power, the AKP sought to preserve pragmatic relations, even attempting to mediate between Jerusalem and Damascus.Footnote ⁷⁵ Talks were scuttled, however, by Israel’s launch of a war in Gaza (Operation Cast Lead) in late 2008 and early January 2009. Erdoğan’s frustration found expression at Davos shortly afterward. Addressing Israeli president Simon Peres in sweeping terms, he declared, “You [Israelis] know how to kill.” Erdoğan’s popularity ratings spiked at home and across the Arab world.

The episode was followed by a series of provocative moves on both sides from the use of anti-Semitic tropes by Turkey’s state media to attempts by right-wing Israeli politicians to humiliate Turkish diplomats. Thus, Israel (re-)emerged as a key “Other” in the neo-Ottoman imaginary – the quintessential antagonist of downtrodden Muslims and their Turkish champions. These dynamics culminated in a 2010 incident, when Israeli forces boarded a Gaza-bound flotilla named Mavi Marmara, in international waters. The flotilla had been sponsored by an Islamist humanitarian organization, and nine Turkish activists were killed in the encounter. Davutoğlu described the event as “Turkey’s 9/11.”

Nevertheless, in keeping with this book’s strategic-cum-performative conception of agency, the source of such stands was as instrumental as ideological: Confronting Israel paid clear dividends in domestic and regional popularity contests. Meanwhile, under the radar, pragmatism persisted. Economic relations with Israel continued to flourish.Footnote ⁷⁶ Furthermore, the will to champion what anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon called the “wretched of the earth” proved quite selective. AKP leaders were not interested in the hardships faced, for example, by workers concerned about spiking industrial accidents associated with neoliberal cost-cutting in workplaces. By way of contrast, pro-religious civil society groups such as Mazlumder (Association for Human Rights and Solidarity for the Oppressed),Footnote ⁷⁷ engaged with a range of oppressed peoples and causes.

These tensions between more inclusionary and exclusionary strands of neo-Ottoman outreach would tip further in favor of the latter after the Arab Spring. Initially, however, regional events appeared to favor the pluralistic vision. Since the early 2000s, talk of a “Turkey model” had circulated at home and in the West. Washington, in particular, had touted the Islamo-liberal project of economic and political liberalization, combined with social conservativism, as an “inspiration” for Muslim-majority democracies.Footnote ⁷⁸ When, in 2011, Tunisians and Egyptians overthrew their dictators and then voted for political Islamist parties in transitional elections, Turkey’s AKP appeared to have been at the vanguard of political Islamist-led democratization. As Arab uprisings against repressive regimes spread like dominos across the Middle East and North Africa, the AKP invested heavily in relations with Muslim Brotherhood-inspired movements, assuming that they would achieve power. This will to lead the region was on display at the AKP’s party congress in 2012 where it hosted a “who’s who” of Brotherhood affiliates. The participation of Egypt’s Mohammed Morsi, Tunisia’s Rasheed Ghannouchi, and Hamas’ Khaled Mashaal at an event where Erdoğan was unquestionably the star also showcased the growing cult of personality around Turkey’s leader. In a 2.5-hour display of his performative power and penchant for neo-Ottoman idiom, Erdoğan delivered a speech that included Islamist poetry by Sezai Karakoç: “From Country of Exile to the Capital of Capitals.” Carrying the crowd to ecstatic heights, weeping supporters spilled into the corridors.Footnote ⁷⁹

The AKP Middle Eastern vision was undermined, however, by subsequent regional developments. The Muslim Brotherhood, for its part, faltered on multiple fronts. In Egypt, Morsi made a clumsy grab for power, provoking widespread opposition and, eventually, counterrevolution. In Syria, neither Ankara’s diplomacy nor Brotherhood activism succeeded in dislodging Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite regime, as elements within the Sunni opposition morphed into a radical jihadist movement. Ankara’s sectarian tilt also strained relations with Shi’a majority neighbors, Iraq and Iran. At home too, pro-Sunni stances impacted AKP engagement of Turkey’s considerable Alevi minority. Far from the “order-setting” role across the former Ottoman space that Davutoğlu had envisaged, by 2013, AKP-led Ankara had lost regional altitude.Footnote ⁸⁰

In this increasingly turbulent context, diverse pockets of domestic resistance to the two emergent features of AKP governance – its majoritarian populism and Sunni Islamist overtones – came to a head when protests erupted over a small park in central Istanbul.

6.4.1 An Oddball Coalition

In terms of participants and their motives, over two million people flocked to protests across the country. They hailed from many walks of life. Demographically, many but by no means all were pro-secular, urban, middle class, and youthful.Footnote ⁸⁵ Protestors’ ranks nonetheless included unlikely bedfellows. These ranged from supporters of otherwise rival football clubsFootnote ⁸⁶ to Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transexual and Queer (LGBTQ) activists. Indeed, since the annual Pride parade coincided with the Gezi events, LGBTQ organizers were able to harness the unprecedented solidarities to draw Gezi protestors to a Pride parade of some 100,000 participants (among the largest ever gathered in a Muslim-majority country).Footnote ⁸⁷ Similarly juxtaposed were Turkish red and white flags – including variants associated with Atatürkist and ultranationalist youth “Grey Wolves” – waving alongside intermittent Kurdish colors.

Likewise notable were black banners emblazoned with Arabic script hoisted by a group called “Anti-Capitalist Muslim Youth.” Associated with the writings of Islamo-progressive intellectuals such as İhsan Eliaçık, the emphasis was on “pluralistic, egalitarian, and tolerant interpretations of Islam,”Footnote ⁸⁸ which challenged the ethics of AKP-led, neoliberal transformation with slogans such as “Allah knows no property.” Such views were part and parcel of a tension to emerge from the Gezi Park protests. Yenigün, drawing on Islamic political theory, characterizes this tension between an “ethical-political project” of Islamism that seeks justice and liberation, in contrast with the “top-down,” statist, and pan-Islamist “Muslimism” that informed AKP policies.Footnote ⁸⁹

In frank recognition of the disruptive energies that cross-camp alignments can generate, an AKP minister responded to this counterintuitive tableau perceptively: “In five days, we achieved [the] uni[fication of] contending social groups under a fog against us. Normally these fractions cannot come together … When the fog disperses,” protestors will be shocked “when they realize that they are sitting next to each other.”Footnote ⁹⁰ In other words, spontaneous resistance had generated unprecedented if nascent forms of mutual recognition across putatively opposed groups.

The disparate activists were driven by overlapping grievances. Concern was shared, for example, that Turkey’s neoliberal transformation, despite its many material benefits, had negatively impacted equality and sustainability. Environmentalist protestors were thus joined by urbanites – working class and bourgeois alike – frustrated at the demolition of historic and green sites to make way for gentrification projects (which often featured neo-Ottoman design elements).

But if post-materialist defense of Gezi’s trees was a catalyst, modernist concerns about democracy were the overarching motive. In the months leading up to Gezi, a series of incidents associated with majoritarian populism had led to this tipping point: The aforementioned, crippling lawsuits leveled against critical media;Footnote ⁹¹ prosecution of satirists, musicians, and other critics of the government;Footnote ⁹² and a pattern of excessive force against protestors.Footnote ⁹³ In public perceptions of these developments, Erdoğan’s agency had loomed large. Thus, resistance to both neoliberal excess and democratic backsliding became wrapped in hostility to his very person (in turn, piquing his highly personalized response to the protests).

A second major source of mobilization was resistance to the growing visibility of Islam. In addition to its growing salience in public sectors such as education and religious governance, many protestors felt that secular lifestyles had come under pressure. Recent measures appeared to take aim at the vibrant entertainment sector. Steep taxes, for instance, had made alcohol consumption a luxury, while choosing to drink was denigrated by AKP figures.Footnote ⁹⁴

Interference in lifestyle choices also informed the rebellion of women perturbed by the encroachment of social conservativism. Alarm bells had been rung by a government proposal to criminalize “adultery” (zina), which also can mean any sexual relations outside of wedlock.Footnote ⁹⁵ The initiative contrasted with earlier state feminism that, as shown in Chapters 4 and 5, had called upon women to perform a sort of public “European-ness” – or Kemalist perceptions thereof – as service to the Westernist project. The frame had served several generations of urban women across class lines. But there were serious limitations, as third-wave feminists had argued since the 1980s. State feminism, for example, failed to dismantle patriarchal structures within the workplace or the home. In the 1990s and 2000s, activists had begun to explore alternative pathways to empowerment. These included the possibility of cooperation between Turkish, liberal/leftist activists and their Kurdish and/or Islamic counterparts.Footnote ⁹⁶

Such cooperation pushed back against the neo-traditionalist message purveyed by the (overwhelmingly male) AKP leadership on the eve of Gezi. Belying the long-standing and energetic participation of many pro-religious women in pro-AKP politics, media, and business,Footnote ⁹⁷ the new, ideal woman-citizen under AKP hegemony was called to serve a neo-natalist agenda.Footnote ⁹⁸ Described as intrinsically different from – if complimentary to – men, women were to uphold family and national honor as mothers and wives. They should have at least three children and desist from reproductive practices, such as caesarean childbirth, which might impact fertility rates. Affirming this agenda, in 2011, the Ministry for Women and Children’s Affairs was dissolved and replaced by a Ministry for Family and Social Services. A series of statements by AKP figures appeared to defend polygamy and domestic abuse in a national context where reports of gender-based violence were spiking dramatically.

In addition to well-organized feminist groups, resistance took playful forms. On the eve of Gezi, for example, circa 100 protestors gathered to defy Ankara subway officials’ admonition of riders for not behaving in accordance “with moral rules.”Footnote ⁹⁹ They did so by kissing publicly for several minutes. A similarly creative riposte was made to Speaker of Parliament, Bülent Arınç,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ who had admonished women for laughing loudly in public (kahkaha atmak): Protestors mounted a viral, social media counter-campaign featuring selfies of women laughing loudly. Innovative usage of social media as resistance anticipated Gezi where female participants outnumbered male counterparts.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Similarly alienated by Sunni neoorthodoxy, heterodox Alevis were active in the Gezi protests. This pattern was attested to by the striking prevalence of Alevi youth among protest fatalities across the country. As observed earlier, Alevis had met AKP outreach in the early 2010s with caution. This was due to historical patterns of assimilationism and persecution. Of concern were education reforms that aimed, as Erdoğan put it, to cultivate a “pious generation” – a prospect that was particularly perturbing for working-class Alevi families who could not afford private schools.Footnote ¹⁰² There was also evidence that AKP redistributive programs for the urban poor neither targeted nor benefitted – and arguably actively excluded – Alevis.

Fears about Sunnification at home were amplified by AKP attempts to project “religious soft power” regionally.Footnote ¹⁰³ Illustrative of the domestic/foreign policy linkage on this sectarian front, the AKP sought to taint CHP leader Kılıçdaroğlu, who was Alevi, with sympathy toward Syria’s Alawite-led regime and its atrocities against Sunni Syrians. Alevis further resented Erdoğan’s dismissive response to a court’s moves to throw out charges against figures implicated in the 1992 Madımak pogrom. The attacks had been committed by Sunni extremists and remained a traumatic “site of memory” for Alevis. More provocative still were the prime minister’s condolences to “my 53 Sunni citizens” after a bomb ripped through the border town of Reyhanlı in May 2013. The subsequent press gag on one of the most fatal acts of terrorism in Turkey’s history to date underscored for Alevis the national media’s inability to report. Alevi anxieties mounted as civil war brewed across the fluid border with Syria where extremists were coalescing into the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), which would burst onto the global consciousness in 2014, denying the very humanity of secular and non-Sunni Muslims. Meanwhile, on the eve of Gezi, the last straw was the naming of a major new urban infrastructural project – a third bridge across the Bosphorus – after Yavuz Sultan Selim, an expansive Ottoman sultan who conquered much what of what today is called the Middle East, including Mecca and Medina, and who Alevis knew for his persecution of their historic brethren.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

If the government’s illiberal and Sunni turn had brought to the street a diverse and wide group of protestors, one opposition group that was conspicuous in its absence was Kurds. This was due to fledging peace talks with the AKP during this period, prompting the Kurdish movement to officially steer clear. That being said, Sırrı Süreyya Önder, a parliamentarian of the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi, BDP), was visible in his solidarity with the protestors. Not Kurdish himself, his involvement was catalytic. For one, it arguably spurred several, prominent CHP figures to lend their presence and networks to the protests, shifting the party toward its ascendant, social democratic wing. Socially, moreover, Önder’s example – and the overall transgression of identity categories at Gezi – was cathartic for many protestors. Especially for millennials, the experience of being erased in mainstream media narratives of Gezi catalyzed recognition that the nationalist–secularist story they had long been told about the Kurdish question also was one-sided. This epiphany would inform engagement with Kurdish perspectives among a subset of “white Turks” – the urban, educated, middle/upper-middle class demographic of secularized Sunni, Turkish speakers who discovered, through Gezi, that Alevis and Kurds were potential allies against the AKP’s religious populism.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Meanwhile, reactions within the AKP coalition were mixed. This diversity attested to differentiated perspectives on political pluralism within the party itself. Key figures from the party’s liberal wing, such as Abdullah Gül and Bülent Arınç, were relatively more receptive to protestors’ demands. The latter, for instance, stated that “the message has been taken.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Their divergence from Erdoğan’s hardline emanated from orientations that fused highly conservative social values vis-à-vis, say, gender roles, with more pluralistic politics that took as a “reference point” the “global post-Cold War democratic wave and universal human rights and liberties.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Erdoğan, for his part, had sought to displace party liberals over the preceding decade. His tools, as Gumuscu documents, included changing party rules and control of recruitment, promotion, and party finances.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ As the protests unfolded, the intra-AKP battle over political pluralism became more visible to the public. Another dissenter was Abdüllatif Şener, a seminal figure from the Milli Görüş movement and an AKP cofounder who had contributed to the “pluralist and collegial atmosphere” of the early AKP.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Dismayed at the party’s evolution, Şener offered impassioned congratulations on CHP-leaning Halk TV to all the protestors, including “youth, women, the elderly”, for upholding democracy as the authorities became increasingly repressive.Footnote ¹¹⁰ As impassioned was the pro-Gezi commentary of the high circulation Gülenist daily, Zaman. The anti-Erdoğan position staked by Gülenist media confirmed a rumored rupture between the secretive Islamist organization and the Nakşibendi-rooted AKP.

6.4.2 Erdoğan’s Counterstrategy: Performing Religious Populism

Confronted with this rebellion from within and beyond the pro-religious coalition, Erdoğan took a hard line upon his return from a tour of North African capitals. In his first public statement, he dismissed the protestors as “ruffians” (çapulcular) and insisted that the repurposing of Gezi Park would proceed. Challenging participants in the language of populist polarization, he declared, “Where they gather 20, I will get up and gather 200,000 people. Where they gather 100,000, I will bring together one million from my party.”Footnote ¹¹¹

The tone was echoed in pro-AKP media outlets such as Sabah and Yeni Şafak. The scathing prose of former football commentator Haşmet Babaoğlu captured the pro-Erdoğan camp’s mood: The “white Turk” brats in the square needed a good thrashing so that the architects of authentic “new Turkey” could get on with business as usual. Lamenting the perceived bias of Western coverage, passions were fueled by (true) reports of attacks on AKP party headquarters by protestors in Izmir as well as (false) accounts of protestors drinking in mosques or urinating on a veiled woman in front of her children.

Reacting to the turbulence, the stock market faltered and global criticism mounted. International rating agencies such as Moody’s warned that Ankara’s newly raised standing could be lowered.Footnote ¹¹² Turkey’s bid to host the Olympics, which was slated for assessment that summer, became moot. Registering the threat to the “Turkish model” narrative, Davutoğlu chastised protestors for “embarrassing” the country, only to draw derision from protestors and international observers who blamed the excessive police response and Erdoğan’s intransigence.

This reading was informed by Erdoğan’s performance at a gathering of EU officials who happened to be attending a conference near the protests.Footnote ¹¹³ In a kairotic moment, the leader sought to (re)direct crisis energies. He did so by appropriating conspiratorial tropes and the language of “double-standards” from the nationalist repertoire. Making a fateful choice between audiences, he chose to ignore the hundreds of high-level dignitaries in the room, speaking instead via streaming cameras to millions across the country. The protests, he declared, were the work of a murky “interest rate lobby”, that is, a mishmash of Zionists, Westerners, and their Turkish proxies. Western governments, moreover, had been more brutal in their own management of recent protests than Turkey’s security forces. The claim revealed irritation at comparisons of Gezi with recent Middle Eastern resistance movements. Ankara had worked hard, after all, to position the AKP as the vanguard of pluralizing change in the region, not as a defender of the authoritarian status quo. The comparison with the Arab Spring uprisings was inaccurate, to be sure, since Turkey was a parliamentary, if flawed, democracy and protestors demanded respect for their rights, not regime change.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Yet, the catalyzing role played by excessive police force – which itself was an expression of the government’s illiberal turn – undeniably had contributed to the mobilization.

Gezi arguably displayed more similarities with Occupy Wall Street and similar mobilizations across Europe after the recent worldwide economic meltdown. Protestors in this vein felt that neoliberal growth had generated an inequitable distribution of benefits (which accrued to the wealthy) and burdens (which accrued to everybody else).Footnote ¹¹⁵ More comparable still were near-contemporaneous protests in Brazil that erupted a few weeks after Gezi in response to flagrant corruption within Brazil’s own majoritarian and populist if leftist government. International commentators and Brazilian marchers alike recognized family resemblances between the movements.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In this regard, Gezi was a “sign of the times,” marking transnational disappointment at neoliberal globalization following the 2008/9 global crisis. In the early 2010s, this frustration took the form of left-leaning protest movements (whereas, by the end of the decade, it would swing hard right).

Gezi, in short, sundered the fabric of Islamo-liberal synthesis, yanking liberals to the left and Islamists to the right. This dynamic was written into the very space that protestors occupied. The park had been a site of long-demolished Ottoman military barracks (Halil Paşa Topçu Kışlası). Fierce fighting had occurred on the site in 1909 when the Young Turk army (Hareket Ordusu – Army of Action) had put down a short-lived rebellion against the 1908 deposition of the pan-Islamist, Sultan Abdülhamit II. In republican historiography, the incident was remembered as a violent outburst of fundamentalist obscurantism. As such, during the single-party period, the barracks were torn down and the square repurposed to promote the republican project. Converted into a park, the site was named for İnönü before acquiring the name Gezi, offering tree-lined paths that led to the Atatürk Convention Center that dominated Taksim Square. Yet, as mayor of Istanbul in the 1990s, Erdoğan had hankered to transform the space, pledging to place a mosque in the environs. The vision had evolved in tandem with Erdoğan’s embrace of economic neoliberalism to include plans for a shopping center, luxury hotel, and other amenities within reconstructed Ottoman-era barracks.

Both republican and the Ottoman-Islamic-cum-neoliberal visions of the site were disrupted, in turn, by the Gezi protests. In the square(s), kairotic force manifested spontaneously, untapped by any leader. Instead, a space was collectively imagined into being that Örs described as “utopian” and Sofos as “transgressive.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ Hard binary accounts of political contestation collapsed in the square, as democracy was staged and enhanced through transient acts of reciprocal recognition. This “creativity of micro-practices”Footnote ¹¹⁸ was evident in hijabi women waving LGBTQ flags. Anti-capitalist Sunni youth offered prayers for slain Alevi protestors. When Ramadan began in mid-July, observant Muslims within the sit-in protest community invited nonobservant counterparts to collectively break bread at the end of the daily fast.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Neo-Ottoman aesthetic and cultural referents were appropriated in tongue-in-cheek ways. A striking case in point was the gender-bending, gas-mask-sporting whirling dervishes whose silhouettes were reproduced in graffiti and internet memes. This “new threshold for democracy where old cleavages between authoritarian secularism and Islam are surpassed and new forms of citizenship are rehearsed”Footnote ¹²⁰ was noted by observers across the political spectrum. As an AKP figure who would later become Minister of Education tweeted in recognition of the protestors’ critique, “If the true Gezi activists were to prepare a political program, it could be the inspiration for a new language for parties, NGOs, and the bureaucracy.”Footnote ¹²¹

Erdoğan, however, honed in on the dangers of his unraveling coalition. Rather than engage the moment’s disruptive energies, and as a strategic and highly performative political actor, he chose to leverage his now significant command of party, state, media, and other resources toward removing intraparty and external challengers. In this definitive turn to an assertive, religious populism, he abandoned many of his own prior gestures to pluralism. The important exception to this new rule was dialogue with Kurdish leaders who had been restrained during the protests, arguably hoping for a historic settlement with the Turkish state. In short, while a glimmer of pluralizing hope persisted in the nascent peace process, the showdown between Erdoğan and his erstwhile allies, including Gülenists who had openly rebelled in the context of Gezi, led to the leader’s embrace of religious populism backed up by the full weight of the state. Nevertheless, as Chapter 7 will show, counterintuitive solidarities generated at Gezi also continued to percolate.

7.2.1 Performing Populist Islamism

Responding with a thundering “no,” Erdoğan pivoted to religious populism. In the process, he helped to pioneer twenty-first-century populism as a political style with distinctive “rhetorical, performative and affective aspects.”Footnote ¹⁶ These included an ability to conjure kairotic spectacle, engaging supporters’ energies directly to (re)shape political outcomes.Footnote ¹⁷ Fusing his very person with a polarizing ideology, Erdoğan sought to rally Muslims of all stripes behind his cause against “cunning” Gülenists and “inauthentic” secularists. In the process, he overshadowed all other players on the AKP field from Gül and Arınç to Ahmet Davutoğlu – who, although prime minister at the time, did not exude or command the passions associated with Erdoğan. Combining an alpha masculinity that appealed to many in Turkey’s paternalistic political culture, Erdoğan simultaneously radiated underdog appeal.Footnote ¹⁸ His genius, in short, lay in the ability to generate – and then to absorb and redress – tensions felt by the masses, while keeping the embers of grievance smoldering for future mobilization.

Emotions upon which Erdoğan capitalized included supporters’ simultaneous sense of hard-won triumph and perineal siege. These sentiments were not entirely misplaced, given recurring attempts at suppression, including when power had been achieved democratically.Footnote ¹⁹ Another affective theme Erdoğan activated was a sense of participation in the revitalized Ottoman-Islamic heritage. A third move was to appropriate twentieth-century, center-right iconography,Footnote ²⁰ wherein the execution of Prime Minister Adnan Menderes (in power, 1950–1960) and the sudden death of President Turgut Özal (in power, 1989–1993) intimated the fate that Erdoğan – soul incarnate of the pious people – might suffer if they did not rally to his cause.

One way that Erdoğan communicated affective-cum-political messages was to cry in public. Tears flowed in response to rousing poetry or music, or poignant accounts of constituents’ woes. Erdoğan wept, for instance, when a popular artist among pro-religious audiences, İbrahim Sadri, delivered a poem that described how the leader had consoled the poet at the death of a parent. Such displays were suggestive of humility and godliness when confronted with the tribulations of righteous Muslims.Footnote ²¹ Thus, Erdoğan stood as “both the same as other men and also different from them, standing above the citizenry, mediating and fostering a conservative political order.”Footnote ²² This role was reinforced by the leader’s uncanny ability to outmaneuver opponents, conferring an aura of God-given invincibility. Popular passions thus engendered were attested to by young men at rallies who wore funeral shrouds (kefen) in a display of willingness to die for Erdoğan’s cause.Footnote ²³

A sense of common purpose in the face of the “existential angst and insecurity”Footnote ²⁴ that Erdoğan’s rhetoric cultivated was further fueled by conspiracy theories. Malignant forces from Masons to MossadFootnote ²⁵ were said to be “playing games” with Turkey’s economic and territorial viability.Footnote ²⁶ Conspiracy theories about Western interference cut across camps, resonating also with non-practicing Muslims on the nationalist right.Footnote ²⁷

Meanwhile, especially for AKP supporters, Western responses to atrocities committed against political Islamists in this period corroborated the claim of double-standards. For example, just weeks after Turkey’s Gezi Park protests had erupted, the Egyptian army capitalized on popular outcry over the country’s first democratically elected president, the Muslim Brotherhood’s (MB) Mohammed Morsi, who had clumsily attempted to grab power. Violently overthrowing Morsi, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi (re-)instated an authoritarian but secular military regime. Thus, around the same time that Western commentators were condemning Erdoğan’s treatment of Gezi protestors, they were silent on Sisi’s massacre of MB protestors. This meant ignoring “one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history”: the August 4, 2013, Rabaa massacre when at least 817 and likely more than 1,000 were killed.Footnote ²⁸ US president Barack Obama nevertheless went on to welcome Sisi’s subsequent “victory” in what one commentator called “pre-stolen elections,”Footnote ²⁹ an endorsement of the regime which was repeated by presidents Trump and Biden.

These patent double-standards, in turn, served AKP dismissal of Western concerns about Turkey’s own illiberal turn.Footnote ³⁰ Instead, Western criticism was characterized as Islamophobic denial of (Sunni) Muslim majorities’ democratic agency across the Middle East. The frame was part and parcel of the role played by “perceived marginalization and systematic injustice suffered by Muslim societies at both the domestic and international levels”Footnote ³¹ in pro-religious visions of world politics. Playing upon the centrality of (in)justice in this imaginary, Erdoğan promised that pervasive wrongs would be righted by the great “chief” (reis)Footnote ³² at the national, but also the global level. His long-standing defense of Palestinians can be read in this context as an attempt to champion downtrodden Muslims (mazlum) everywhere. The adversary in this narrative: a decadent and declining but persistently imperialist West – and its Middle Eastern minions such as Israel and secularists – who would soon be eclipsed by the ethical and rising East.

7.2.2 The Postcolonial Dimension

If such frames had origins in the right-wing Occidentalism of Necip Fazıl Kısakürek (covered under “neo-Ottomanism” in Chapter 6), another source was the “Anatolian Islamic Socialism” of Nurettin Topçu.Footnote ³³ A major literary figure for conservatives, who Erdoğan regularly cited in emotive performances,Footnote ³⁴ Topçu sought a mystical, solidaristic, and egalitarian role for Anatolian Islam as an ethical “third way between global capitalism and communism.”Footnote ³⁵ In this reading, the “people” invoked by the term mazlum are subalterns within anti-colonial and anti-capitalist thought, that is, the global underclasses or “wretched of the earth” who are silenced by systems of power. Mobilization in this vein seeks to redress subalterns’ exploitation by decoupling from Western-dominated modernity.Footnote ³⁶ These anti-colonial inflections meant that even though Erdoğan’s Islamist populism leaned right, it shared a register with the leftist (or “pink”) populism on display in Victor Chavez’s Venezuela, Rafael Correa’s Ecuador, and Evo Morale’s BoliviaFootnote ³⁷ – places where decolonial projects coalesced in conversation with world systems/Marxist rather than Islamist critique.Footnote ³⁸

To be sure, Turkey was never formally colonized. Yet, the late Ottoman experience of capitulations and occupation by Western powers – and the state’s cultivation of memories thereof throughout the republican period – supported the anti-colonial subtext of Erdoğan’s religious populism.Footnote ³⁹ In other words, the bid to position Turkey as the champion of suppressed (Sunni) Muslims globally was in sync with other global South foreign policies that challenged Western (neo)imperialism.Footnote ⁴⁰ In 2010, for example, and in cooperation with Brazil’s leftist populist leader, Luiz Ináncio Lula da Silva, Ankara had attempted to broker a nuclear deal with Iran without securing support from Washington (an initiative that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton swiftly torpedoed). Similarly, in autumn 2014, Erdoğan told an audience of Latin American leaders that Muslims had “discovered America.”Footnote ⁴¹ Intentionally or otherwise, the claim – which may have referenced the great Muslim-Chinese navigator, Zheng He, who arguably reached South America before Columbus – was intelligible as an anti-colonial attempt to write “non-Europeans” back into global history. Erdoğan also would seek to associate himself with the anti-colonial legacy of boxer Muhammad Ali on the occasion of the iconic Black Muslim activist’s funeral in 2016, a move that was firmly rebuffed by Ali’s family.Footnote ⁴²

7.2.3 The Neoliberal Developmentalist Dimension

Postcolonial chords for restorative justice in Erdoğan’s populist repertoire also resonated with developmentalism in Turkish political Islam. The linkage was apparent in the AKP’s very name which organically bonded “justice” (adalet) and “development” (kalkınma). This linkage functions in Islamist repertoires much like “freedom” and “prosperity” are bonded in liberalism. For the AKP, with its unabashedly neoliberal economic agenda, this linkage between justice and development was established by framing capitalist growth and infrastructural investment as overdue redress of the indignities long-suffered by the righteous (Sunni-Muslim) “people.”

In party messaging, this connection – and Erdoğan’s role as the chief architect of “authentic” modernization – was fostered via rousing imagery and music. Campaign ads combined drone vistas of monumental new bridges, highways, and mosques with Ottoman-Islamic referents. Megaprojects in this vein included massive new mosques, like a sunset-transforming structure in Istanbul, as well as the Marmaray subway tunnel linking the “Asian” and “European” sides of the Bosporus. A massive new airport for Istanbul likewise fused developmentalist and neo-Ottoman palatial and religious motifs in a bid to position Turkey as a global transit hub and destination. Even the promise of future development proved galvanizing. A case in point has been the pledge to forge a second channel through the Bosporus, Kanal Istanbul. The purpose: to elevate shipping, energy, and real estate/construction interests to a level commensurate with a world historic city at the crossroads of commerce and civilizations. In all such projects, the high environmental costs and questionable added value from a functional perspective took backstage to Islamist-cum-developmentalist grandeur (see Figure 7.1).

Figure 7.1 A larger-than-life image of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan flies from a highway, evoking the populist leader’s developmentalist and law and order synthesis that he fused with Islamist and neo-Ottoman motifs.

(Shutterstock)

To be sure, the claim to developmental/ postcolonial moral authority was discordant with the actual impacts of neoliberal economics. This tension is likewise evident in the postures of right- and left-wing populists around the globe who purport to defend the everyman while their policies enrich inner circles. Yet, the dissonance between pledges to defend the vulnerable on the one hand, and pursuit of extravagant wealth on the other, did not perturb followers so long as they benefitted from the clientelist redistribution of surplus. In this regard, acceptance of capitalist development, whether by statist or market mechanisms, is consistent with long-standing motifs in Turkey’s political Islamist and center-right traditions. These include the Milli Görüş view since the late 1960s/early 1970s that emancipation will be achieved via industrialization, and Özal’s “heterodox” fusion throughout the 1980s of social conservatism with economic neoliberalism.Footnote ⁴³ Indeed, the developmentalist “pillar” of Erdoğan’s populism proved a crucial component of “consent-building”Footnote ⁴⁴ across target constituencies. As philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s notion of “hegemony” suggests, civil society plays a key role in manufacturing social consent for a given form of rule. Tuğal showed that in the pre- and early AKP periods, Islamists’ anti-systemic fervor was “absorbed” by neoliberal capitalism.Footnote ⁴⁵ A decade later, this pacification process acquired a strong populist thrust, as the AKP sought to infuse supporters with a sense of accomplishment at an economic “success story” the world was said to “watch with envy.”

Actors associated with this populist fusion of neoliberal developmentalism with social conservativism included the new, pro-religious bourgeoisie, as well as pragmatists from the old elite. These cadres either enjoyed or ignored populist displays given the concrete benefits of participating in networks that would be compromised by Erdoğan’s exit from the scene. Religious populism and its developmentalist overtones also appealed to conservative, working, and lower-middle-class voters. For these groups, the economic challenges created by Turkey’s neoliberal transformation were mitigated by a sense of participation in neo-Ottoman manifest destiny in tandem with material benefits such as social services and redistributive programs specifically tailored for such cadres.Footnote ⁴⁶ Features included mortgage and retirement credits, free white goods, and handouts of coal and wood.Footnote ⁴⁷ As Atalay shows, this co-option of conservative constituencies, like religious populism overall, was also highly gendered. Faith-based NGOs, for instance, emphasized the moral responsibility of families to absorb the costs of neoliberal restructuring via notions of fıtrat, namely, the “naturalness” of gender complementarity rather than equality.Footnote ⁴⁸

Religious populism proved effective at mobilizing voters. Erdoğan won major victories in both municipal elections (60 percent of the vote and most major cities) and Turkey’s first-ever direct race for president in August (52 percent of the vote). Both races ultimately were deemed “free,” but unfair elements were widely noted by watchdog groups.Footnote ⁴⁹ This assessment was corroborated by the newly founded “Vote and Beyond” (Oy ve Ötesi), an independent civil society initiative that trained volunteers as election monitors across the country.

Erdoğan’s electoral victories, in turn, reinforced the hegemonic position of the AKP in a context of severe democratic backsliding. Scholars increasingly characterized this turn from “tutelary” or “delegative” democracyFootnote ⁵⁰ as “competitive authoritarianism,”Footnote ⁵¹ or an outright “exit from democracy.”Footnote ⁵² The apparent goal was to transition to the strong presidential system that, Erdoğan believed, would guarantee his primacy and legacy. Nevertheless, under Turkey’s parliamentary system, only a two-thirds majority (367/550 seats) could authorize constitutional change directly, while a three-fifths majority (330/550) was needed to take the proposal for a presidential system to nationwide referendum.

Attesting to the causal force of cross-camp coalitions, to secure such votes would require at least one block to align with Erdoğan’s core constituency.

7.2.4 The “Time of the Kurds”: Ideas, Actors, and Structures

Turkey’s some 15 million KurdsFootnote ⁵³ made up 18 percent of the country’s population and, in the 2011 national elections, some 7 percent of the electorate, carrying pro-Kurdish candidates to the legislature. Kurds thus stood out as prospective interlocutors for Erdoğan’s presidential plans. The ground for dialogue had been paved over the preceding decade. During this period of détente between Ankara and Kurdish militants, the AKP produced policies more amenable to ethnic pluralism than any ruling party in Turkey’s history. As such, a peace process between the two camps offered a rare chance for pluralizing reform at a time when the bitter power struggle between rival Islamist factions and the concomitant turn to religious populism was impacting Turkey’s democracy.

In terms of actors, the AKP’s ethnically inclusive invocations of Islam had built credibility among religious Kurds and, to a lesser extent, the secular leftists of the Kurdish movement. Erdoğan and other party figures, as will be remembered from previous chapters, had engaged with Kurdish aspirations. AKP Vice Chairman Hüseyin Çelik had even asserted: “either we will solve this problem, or this problem will unravel us.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Tangible results included once unthinkable outcomes such as elective language instruction in Kurdish and other minority languages in public secondary schools. Such outcomes were offset, however, by intermittent censure of pro-Kurdish political parties and activists by the courts and security forces.

There were at least two – non-mutually exclusive – explanations for this dissonance between inclusive frames and exclusionary practices. Echoing liberal allies of the AKP in the 2000s, some saw dissonance as a function of residual, pre-AKP ethno-nationalism within state institutions, which only the party had the capacity to change. For other pro-Kurdish analysts, however, the dissonance raised red flags. After all, the AKP’s commitment to change, much less political pluralism, clearly had weakened as it internalized the unitary reflexes of a state it increasingly controlled.

On the Kurdish side, the main architect of the peace process launched in 2013 was Abdullah Öcalan. Founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK), Öcalan had overseen a full-scale insurgency launched in 1984 that had sought an independent Kurdistan. Later, however, he had renounced separatism in calls for a political solution. Captured in 1999, he was still regarded as public enemy #1: a “baby-killer” responsible for over 40,000 deaths since the inception of violent conflict. Öcalan now sought a transformation in his image from terrorist to peacemaker. His bid recalled the (successful) transformation orchestrated in the 1990s by the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s (PLO) Yasser Arafat in the context of the Oslo peace accords.

Öcalan, however, had not been the AKP’s preferred partner. Erdoğan had tried to decouple the engagement of religious Kurds from any outreach to the imprisoned Kurdish leader, the PKK, and the political wing of the secular-leftist Kurdish movement (represented by a series of political parties that regularly regrouped when shut down by state institutions). For example, Erdoğan had described the Kurdish leader and his followers as “atheists, enemies of religion … non-genuine Muslims” and “pagan Zoroastrians.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Yet, as fumbled earlier attempts to parlay with alternative Kurdish partners demonstrated, Öcalan’s participation was necessary for meaningful negotiations given that key Kurdish factions endorsed him as the only acceptable interlocutor.Footnote ⁵⁶ The result was that both the militant wing (“Kandil”Footnote ⁵⁷) and political party (HDP) of the Kurdish movement appeared to follow Öcalan’s lead when it came to Erdoğan’s overtures.

7.2.5 Framing Peace: Islamic Brotherhood, Egalitarian Democracy

Attesting to how strategic-cum-performative actors mobilize syncretic ideas toward brokering – oftentimes fragile – alignments, Erdoğan and Öcalan forged an overlapping language.Footnote ⁵⁸ The former privileged religious arguments for multiculturalism under the rubric of Ottoman-Islamic revivalism. In a June 2009 speech in Diyarbakır, for example, Erdoğan argued that there were no grounds for conflict so long as Muslims acted like (Sunni) Muslims (e.g., reciting the same passages from the Koran when grieving, or facing Mecca in prayer). In other words, Erdoğan sought to “‘de-ethnicize’ the problem, eschewing ethnic-nationalism (Turkish/Kurdish),” while “re-Islamiciz[ing]” collective identity by stressing overlapping religious values and “the Ottoman Empire as a shared history.”Footnote ⁵⁹ In a gesture, moreover, to pre-Ottoman but unmistakably Sunni solidarities, Erdoğan invoked a history of military and cultural connectivity between Turks and Kurds dating back to the Crusades.

Reviving such themes on the eve of the peace process in February 2013, the Turkish leader also explicitly linked “brotherhood” in Islam and a political solution to the conflict with converting the country into an executive presidency.

Öcalan, for his part, had begun incorporating Islamic referents into his Marxist framework after the Cold War. Religion, he argued, was a source of morality that only in its totalizing forms becomes egregious. Moreover, he argued, pre-Islamic but geographically “authentic” Mesopotamian civilization offered resources for solidarity across the region’s peoples. These religious and civilizational inflections positioned the Kurdish movement to engage the significant religious constituency within Kurdish society. The “brothers under Islam” argument also helped to secure support for the peace process from religious Turks and Kurds. These frames’ resonance was attested to by a survey conducted in spring/summer 2014. It revealed that 76 percent of AKP supporters, Kurdish and Turkish alike, viewed the talks favorably, compared with under 30 percent support from CHP and MHP voters.Footnote ⁶¹

Öcalan was unwilling, however, to fully abandon the radical project upon which the Kurdish militant and political movement had been built. His civilizational sources for peacemaking, in this regard, were informed less by the AKP’s Islamic civilizationalism than by dialogue with leftist-anarchist thinkers. In particular, Öcalan was inspired by Murray Bookchin who had explored early Sumerian practices of communal governance such as “freedom” or “manumission” (amargi) as an Ur-case, as it were, of radical democratic community.Footnote ⁶² The approach was foundational to much of Öcalan’s writing from prison in which he laid out a theoretical framework for Kurdish mobilization in the form of “democratic confederalism”: a pathway to Kurdish autonomy at the substate level (e.g., provincial or municipal). The project was not antithetical to the authority of an overarching state, so long as Ankara embraced ethnic pluralism and administrative decentralization. Autonomous governance, in turn, was to be negotiated across the diverse ethnic, religious, sectarian, gender, and class groups – including women and workers – in Kurds’ geography. In practice, however, Kurdish mobilization was not necessarily bottom-up or pluralistic. Rather, as Leezenberg argues, it was hierarchical and exclusionary toward rival Kurdish movements. This was in keeping with the PKK’s original Leninist vanguardism and the cult of personality around Öcalan.Footnote ⁶³

Nevertheless, throughout the talks, Öcalan managed the tension between his Islamo-liberal and radical leftist frames by mixing metaphors (a strategy that often animates the negotiation of cross-camp frameworks for cooperation). The fusion was on display when negotiations went public on March 21, 2013, the spring equinox and a major holiday for Kurds and many other Eurasian peoples (Nevruz/Newroz). In Turkey, however, it had become an occasion for violent clashes between Kurdish youth and Turkish security forces. It was therefore all the more dramatic that on this particular Nevroz, a five-page letter from imprisoned Öcalan was read to a crowd of two million in the predominantly Kurdish city of Diyarbakır.

The location also was meaningful since Diyarbakır had long been a site of clashes with the Turkish authorities. Along with other cities across the region, it had hosted millions displaced from surrounding areas during emergency rule that spanned a generation (1987–2002). Pro-Kurdish municipalities, in turn, had fostered cultural awakening among those who came of age under their jurisdiction. The pronounced role of urban spaces in stimulating Kurdish identity politics meant that cities had become sites of radical recruitment, but also of peaceful mobilization to redress socioeconomic and political marginalization.Footnote ⁶⁴ With the partial desecuritization of the Kurdish issue during the AKP-dominated decade that preceded Öcalan’s address, the peaceful approach had gained traction. The result, in the early 2010s, was an “astounding” transformation of Diyarbakır into a cradle of civil society activism.Footnote ⁶⁵

Celebrating this apparent transformation, Öcalan lauded historical and cultural affinities between the peoples of Mesopotamia and Anatolia as an “authentic” source of pluralism, modernity, and democracy:

The speech thus evoked “age-old” forms of religious pluralism to push back against the Turkish state’s unitary, ethno-nationalism. At the same time, it evoked Western liberal norms for the pluralistic reimagination of “us.” The text went on to call for a ceasefire – a message that was affirmed by PKK headquarters in Kandil.

The dialog was live. In the weeks that followed, it yielded PKK withdrawals to camps in northern Iraq, and the preparation of a legal framework for negotiations. By the summer, a “Law Regarding the Cessation of Terrorism and the Strengthening of Societal Integration” was signed by President Gül.Footnote ⁶⁷ In October 2013, a further development was the removal of the Kemalist pledge of allegiance to the nation (Andımız) recited daily by pupils at the start of the school week across the country. The pledge had included content that citizens of non-Turkish ethnicity found problematic, such as the statement, “How happy is the one who says I am a Turk” (ne mutlu Türküm diyene).

At the civic level, where a majority of the national electorate approved of the peace process,Footnote ⁶⁸ Erdoğan appointed a group of “wise people” including celebrities and secular, liberal intellectuals. In the spirit of participatory democracy, they were tasked with travelling the country to engage citizens at “town hall” type fora. For liberal participants, who constituted the last remnants of the secular liberal and Islamo-liberal alliance of the previous decade, these encounters were tantalizing. Some had been dialoguing with Kurdish civil society for decades. A successful peace process that made the public sphere safe for Kurdish and, by extension, other forms of ethnic diversity had the potential to salvage a meaningful piece of the otherwise defunct, Islamo-liberal synthesis. The prospect of a permanent peace also appealed to the liberal business community, as signaled by the Turkish Industrialists and Business Association’s (TÜSİAD) early endorsement in February 2013.Footnote ⁶⁹ The talks likewise heartened international observers who otherwise were worried about Turkey’s trajectory.Footnote ⁷⁰

When most pro-Kurdish politicians kept a distance from the summer’s Gezi protests, the nascent dialogue with Ankara appeared to gain momentum. Into the fall and spring, progress was made toward a framework for an agreement with much shuttling of HDP delegations and government representatives to and from Öcalan’s prison on İmralı island. However, substantive information regarding the terms of settlement remained limited. This opacity brought back memories of the nontransparent process and, ultimately, anti-pluralist outcome of the 2010 constitutional referendum. Participants in the dialogue began accusing counterparts of reneging on commitments.Footnote ⁷¹ As trust faded, skeptics reiterated the view that the entire process was a short-term, tactical gambit by Erdoğan to outmaneuver Gülenists and the opposition coalition in pursuit of his coveted presidential system. As the authorities’ heavy handed response during and after GeziFootnote ⁷² layered onto Kurds’ multigenerational memory of state pressure, many could imagine that their allyship would likewise be discarded should the peace settlement prove to be a mere quid pro quo for Erdoğan’s presidency.

7.2.6 The Regional Dimension

In addition to this domestic dance between agential, ideational, and contextual factors, growing ambivalence on the part of both Ankara and Kurds must be read in the broader, regional context. With the 2011 US withdrawal of forces from Iraq, and civil war escalating in Syria, concern mounted in Ankara at the rise of two entities on the border: the Islamic State (ISIS or Daesh) and Rojava (Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria). Hot conflict between jihadists and Kurds attempting to build rival states on the border presented a very different backdrop for peace talks than the permissive regional environment in which the peace process was originally conceived.Footnote ⁷³

Of particular relevance to internal negotiations was the rise of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat, PYD). The PYD, which was organically linked to the PKK, capitalized on Damascus’ preoccupation with Sunni rebels such as ISIS to launch what many Kurds called the “Rojava revolution.” Described as an experiment in egalitarian governance, the Rojava project sought to realize Öcalan’s Bookchin-inspired framework. Led by Kurds, Rojava was, in principle, if not necessarily in practice, inclusive of women and minorities such as Armenians, Arabs, Assyrians, and Turkmen. This radical ethnic and gender pluralism also appealed to some in post-Gezi Turkey as well as the West.

The Turkish security community, however, saw any PKK-associated statelet coalescing along the Turkish-Syrian border as an existential threat, especially because Rojava connected three heavily Kurdish-populated cantons from western Syria to Iraqi Kurdistan. The project, as such, could be read as a step toward the worst-case scenario in the Turkish nationalist imaginary: an independent Kurdistan uniting the Middle East’s 25–35 million KurdsFootnote ⁷⁴ to be carved from Turkish, Syrian, Iraqi, and Iranian territories.

The tinderbox blew up in October 2014 as ISIS closed in on Kobani, a strategically situated town in Rojava within shouting distance of the Turkish-Syrian border. As some 200,000 refugees surged into Turkey,Footnote ⁷⁵ Kurdish fighters from both Turkey and the autonomous Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) of northern Iraq mobilized to aid their brethren in Kobani’s defense. This unprecedented and cathartic outpouring of unity across the region’s factionalized Kurds set off further alarms for Ankara.Footnote ⁷⁶

In a global environment that was increasingly sympathetic to Kurds, who were willing to serve as “boots on the ground” in the battle against ISIS, the AKP faced pressure to open the border to transnational Kurdish mobilization. Yet, at this transformative juncture, the government instead hedged in a move that was received by many Kurds as a profound breach of trust. The Turkish Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, Taner Yıldız, explained the reasoning: “Some want us to make a choice” between ISIS and the PKK” (which Yıldız equated with the PYD), but the two organizations were “the same” in Ankara’s eyes.Footnote ⁷⁷ When Prime Minister Davutoğlu and President Erdoğan affirmed this view, Kurds across Turkey rioted. The turmoil caused some fifty deaths.Footnote ⁷⁸

For liberals engaged in the peace process, Ankara’s argument was unacceptable and several prominent figures left the “wise persons” group that had been appointed to generate public dialogue around the negotiations. Explaining the visceral response of those who had invested in the peace process, Aslı Aydıntaşbaş wrote in the New York Times that like many Turks of her generation, she had transcended the “hatred” of the PKK inculcated by the ethno-nationalist state. Today, she argued, Turkey had a moral obligation to help the Kurds battling ISIS who were protecting, “not only our physical well-being but our entire way of life … for this we must be grateful.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Such stances affirmed the post-Gezi synergies between a number of moderately or non-nationalist, pro-secular Turks. This was especially true for women, who were drawn both to the post-patriarchal aspects of the Kurdish movement and Kurds’ fight against ISIS’s nightmarish rendition of Sunni primacy.Footnote ⁸⁰ Anxieties about radical Islamism were fueled by allegations that the AKP was turning a blind eye to jihadist, cross-border movements and recruitment in Turkey. The motive for perceived laxity, some suggested, was instrumental: a case of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend.” This was because ISIS, and other pro-Sunni fighters in Syria, were seeking to overturn the Assad regime (which was Ankara’s diplomatic bête noire during this period due to Damascus’ earlier rebuff of Ankara’s efforts to mediate in the conflict). Still others believed that Ankara’s inaction on Kobani emanated from outright sympathy for the extremists’ agenda – a chilling prospect for nonobservant and non-Sunni citizens of Turkey.

7.2.7 Agential Interruption: Selahattin Demirtaş

On this fraught domestic and regional stage, HDP leader Demirtaş gained attention. A former human rights lawyer, the telegenic Demirtaş’ star had risen when he carried 9.7 percent of the vote as a presidential candidate in the August 2014 contest. This showing had raised the HDP’s share by some 3 percentage points nationally. The performance suggested that Demirtaş could lead the HDP into parliament as a party rather than by fielding independent candidates. Described as a “Kurdish Obama,”Footnote ⁸¹ Demirtaş used rhetorical skills to navigate the margins of collective identity, inspiring in diverse audiences a sense that their aspirations had been heard.

Communicative acumen enabled the Kurdish leader to mobilize his base, but also to absorb Gezi’s unrequited energies among Turkey’s “other half” who, albeit for differentiated reasons, shared concern over AKP primacy. To be sure, the HDP’s counterhegemonic and “inclusive populism” had little chance of winning over Turkish ethno-nationalists of Kemalist or right-wing stripe.Footnote ⁸² But it resonated with a smaller yet motivated post-Gezi coalition.Footnote ⁸³ Not a huge group by any measure, crossover voters from this bloc saw Demirtaş and the HDP as the country’s best chance for ethnic, religious, sectarian, and gender pluralism. In conjunction with swing votes from religious Kurds who typically voted AKP, but who were dismayed by the government’s stand on Kobani, Demirtaş had the potential to thrust the HDP into parliament.

Seizing the moment, the HDP announced in January 2015 that it would run as a party. The gambit, if successful, would prevent the AKP from securing the two-thirds majority needed to convert the country to a presidential system. Demirtaş thus rejected the quid pro quo logic of the peace process with a catchy turn-of-phrase that resonated across the political opposition: “We will never make you president.”

Erdoğan – alarmed by Demirtaş’ crosscutting appeal, and likely registering the anxiety of Turkey’s security community at PYD momentum across the border – responded by scuttling the peace process. The move came shortly after a much-publicized breakthrough between the government negotiating team, İmralı, and the HDP delegation.Footnote ⁸⁴ The president nevertheless proceeded to woo the ethno-nationalist vote, backtracking on his earlier overtures to the Kurdish movement. Notably, this meant rejecting the language of ethnic pluralism that Erdoğan himself had advanced vis-à-vis Kurds. For instance, just days before the June 2015 elections, he declared that even

Backtracking on ethnic pluralism, Erdoğan nevertheless sought the ongoing support of religious Kurds under the rubric of Islamic brotherhood. This discursive balancing act was on display during a May rally in the southeastern city of Batman when the president sought to explain his reversal on negotiations to a mostly Kurdish audience. Arguing that the “Kurdish question” was discriminatory because it exceptionalized the concerns of “Kurdish brothers” over others, he called instead for unity under Islam. In a vivid move that generated much commentary, this call to unity in diversity under the banner of religion was conveyed by waving a Kurdish-language translation of the Koran, newly produced by the increasingly influential Directorate of Religious Affairs.

The attempt to pitch ethno-nationalism to Turkish audiences and religious unity to Kurds proved unsuccessful. Instead, the HDP soared over the electoral threshold with 13 percent of the vote, more than doubling its showing in the nationwide, municipal elections of 2014. Although the AKP still carried almost 41 percent of the electorate, its 258 seats fell far short of the 367-seat mandate needed to convert Turkey into a presidential system, and 330 needed to bring a referendum on the question to the public. In fact, the vote cost the AKP its ability to form a single-party government. This was a staggering result in a system that the party had dominated for thirteen years. Another striking outcome was the diversity of the incoming legislature. An affirmation of political, social, and gender pluralism, the body would include Alevi and Christian representation (Armenians, Greeks, and Syriacs), as well as Yezidis, Roma, and an unprecedented number of women parliamentarians.

7.4.1 Emergency Rule

There was one conclusion, however, upon which people across this spectrum agreed: The attempted coup offered the government a golden opportunity, or in Erdoğan’s words, a “gift from God”Footnote ⁹⁷, to claim extraordinary powers. Five days after the events, a state of emergency was declared. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has described the “state of exception” associated with martial law as a “no-man’s-land between public law and political fact,” that is, as the juridical expression of raw power that those at the helm of a state can use to simultaneously “bind” and “abandon” citizens.Footnote ⁹⁸ In the case of Turkey, this unbridled power amplified properties that had gained salience since at least the 2013 clash of Islamisms: the government’s increasingly heavy hand, and the pivot to religious nationalism.Footnote ⁹⁹ Converging spectacularly in the aftermath of the coup attempt, these forces culminated in a massive overhaul of state institutions.

First, suspected Gülenists across entities such as the military, police, and gendarmeries, the judiciary, and the bureaucracy were suspended, fired, and/or arrested. The education system was targeted from public institutions in which Gülenists were said to be embedded to private universities associated with the movement’s extensive network of educational institutions. Gülenist media outlets were shuttered. No quarter was spared even for prominent former allies such as public intellectuals Nazlı Ilıcak and Ali Bulaç both of whom were imprisoned. Similarly swept up at this stage were several liberal journalists and academics who had participated in the Islamo-liberal coalition, especially figures who had continued working with Gülenists after 2013.

The next wave swept over Kurds. This outcome was aided by the removal of HDP deputies’ parliamentary immunity shortly before the coup attempt, and the refusal to offer the party a place at the table in postcoup discussions with parties in parliament.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Eventually, fifteen deputies, including Demirtaş and party co-chair, Figen Yüksekdağ, were jailed, their seats in parliament revoked. Ninety-four out of 102 municipalities in southeastern Turkey also saw their HDP-affiliated mayors removed and replaced by state-appointed trustees, with dozens of Kurdish mayors jailed.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Given the nascent alignment between moderate Kurds and secular liberals and leftists in the context of Gezi, Kobani, and the 2015 elections, the crackdown then came for 1,128 Turkish signatories of a petition prior to the coup attempt that had condemned the government’s turnaround on the Kurdish question. The “Academics for Peace”Footnote ¹⁰² platform included prominent and up-and-coming intellectuals who had responded to the state’s recent treatment of Kurds with a statement declaring that, as citizens of conscience, they would not be party “to the government’s crime.”Footnote ¹⁰³ As of November 2023, according to the Academics for Peace website, the number of academics who had been dismissed, fired, or forced into either retirement or resignation was 549; 822 signatories faced further charges on grounds of disseminating propaganda that incited the public to terrorism, and 70 remained under detention.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Many sacked academics, journalists, and public intellectuals were prevented, moreover, from subsequently leaving the country, even as they were blacklisted at home.

Finally, liberal civil society in general came under siege when figures such as philanthropist Osman Kavala was arrested in 2017, along with the chair of Amnesty International’s Turkey office, followed by more civil society leaders. The charges: allegedly organizing the Gezi Park protests that were increasingly framed as an “uprising” (rather than the widely used description of the events as “protests”). In effect, the case sought to retroactively criminalize the mobilizations of 2013, sending a clear message that dissent in general would be punished.

In sum, a pattern emerged, whereby oppositional actors were suppressed irrespective of the role they had played during the actual coup attempt. In this context, the repressive apparatus of the pre-AKP era was revamped, including alleged, extralegal practices. A UN special rapporteur, for example, cited “widespread” cases of torture and impunity for perpetrators.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ This development was striking in that torture had been a commonplace practice in late twentieth-century Turkey and curtailed by the AKP during its first term in power. But as the political, ethnic, and religious pluralism that earlier iterations of the party had helped to foster were abandoned, the country came to resemble the post-1980 coup era with its anti-pluralist, Turkish-Islamic synthesis. This time, however, as will be shown in Chapter 8, the project fused religious populism with ethno-nationalism for what I call the “Turkish-Islamist Synthesis 2.0.”

8.2.1 Actors

The AKP–MHP dubbed their formal alliance the Cumhur İttifakı (“People’s” Alliance). The term evoked the presidency (cumhurbaşkanlığı) and the goal of switching to a presidential system. It resonated, moreover, with notions of the “people” in early secularist nationalism and the populist claim to embody the people today. Cumhur also had Arabic roots associated with majoritarianism in governance and jurisprudence.Footnote ²

Breaking down the interests served, for Erdoğan and the AK party, the coalition enabled a supramajority in parliament toward a nationwide referendum – and then vote – on the executive presidency (many powers of which the leader de facto wielded under post-putsch emergency law). The alliance further marginalized more pluralist figures within the pro-religious coalition who tended to favor a parliamentary system.Footnote ³

On the ultranationalist side, the alliance gave the long-standing MHP leader, Devlet Bahçeli, a kingmaker’s perch. And it offered opportunities to continue mainstreaming the right-wing ideal of a unitary Turco-Muslim state – and MHP supporters – within the state apparatus. This organic overlap between Bahçeli’s ethno(-religious) nationalism and Erdoğan’s (ethno-)religious nationalism was reflected in features of the MHP and AKP grassroots. Both groups, for example, were religious, although AKP supporters were more likely to practice consistently.

Bahçeli’s pivot to alliance with the AKP was not well received by all MHP voters. Dissatisfaction emboldened a breakaway party: Meral Akşener’s İYİ (Good) Party. Akşener was known to followers as the “she-wolf” – a mythical creature in the ultranationalist pantheon said to have led ancient Turkic tribes into Anatolia. Her program fused secular ethno-nationalism, and homage to Atatürk, with a relaxed approach to everyday forms of piety such as veiling. Akşener thus challenged Bahçeli’s compromise with religious populism. Yet, even with this split in the ethno-nationalist vote, both the MHP and İYİ surpassed the electorate threshold in 2018 elections. Securing forty-nine and forty-six seats, respectively, or just over 20 percent of the national vote, the performance attested to right-wing nationalist gains in the “new Turkey.”Footnote ⁴

A third set of actors in the “unholy alliance of various anti-Westernists, secularist-nationalists and Islamists”Footnote ⁵ were left-wing nationalists and a subset of Atatürkists who broke with co-ideologists that remained in the opposition. Small factions electorally, these groups’ vociferous anti-Western arguments – and support for “Eastern” revisionism à la Russian president Vladimir Putin – reinforced the Cumhur coalition’s discursive repertoire.Footnote ⁶

A colorful figure from this faction was former Maoist, Doğu Perinçek. His Eurasianism had antecedents in the left-wing offshoots of Kemalism advocated by the 1930s Kadro and 1960s Yön movements. In the 1990s, Perinçek engaged the renaissance in Russian Eurasianist thought. Rumored to have connections with Russian idealogue Alexander Dugin, Perinçek’s Eurasianists had been implicated in the Ergenekon trials. They were rehabilitated, however, after the Gülenist-Erdoğanist fallout. Electorally inviable, Perinçek and his Patriotic (Vatan) Party nevertheless sought to position themselves as a conduit between Ankara and Moscow where Perinçek claimed to have organic connections.Footnote ⁷

More consequentially, the Cumhur alignment resonated in military circles with ultranationalist and Eurasianist sympathies. These cadres had long lamented Turkey’s transatlantic commitments.Footnote ⁸ In the early 2000s, for instance, the secretary-general of the National Security Council had argued that Ankara should turn from Brussels to Moscow and Tehran. At that time, however, a very different AKP – with its pro-European Union (EU), Islamo-liberal platform – was gaining momentum. The party went on in the late 2000s to pursue desecuritization at home and abroad via the dialogue with Kurds and Davutoğlu’s “zero-problems-with-neighbors” foreign policy. As Akça and Balta observe, this paradigm meant no enemies and therefore, in a sense, no raison d’être for the army.Footnote ⁹ After the 2016 coup attempt, however, enemies abounded, both real and suspected. With Erdoğan determined to root Gülenists out of the state apparatus, and in need of allies within the army toward this end, a window opened for ultranationalist and Eurasianist officers to help shape national debates and grand strategy.

8.2.2 Ideas: Ethno-Religious Nationalism Meets Eurasianism

This oddball, ethnic, and religious nationalist coalition encompassed about half the electorate. Like all contingent alignments across political camps, it was not mobilized via immutable identity or ideological commitments. Rather, strategic-cum-performative actors appropriated features of each faction’s repertoire. A striking node of overlap, which defied “secularist vs. Islamist” expectations, was the embrace by Cumhur’s secular nationalists of an ethnicized Islamic identity.

The TIS 2.0 drew on the pro-Sunni/Muslim subtext of Turkish ethno-nationalism. The approach had antecedents in Young Turk Turanism, the racist Turkish History Thesis of the 1930s, and the TIS of the post-1980 era. Novel ingredients of the 2.0 version included its incorporation of the Islamicized neo-Ottoman nostalgia of the Milli Görüş movement and Erdoğan’s personal brand of pugnacious populism.

The TIS 2.0 also appropriated earlier versions of an “alliance between the military” and religion “as native to … Turks’ cultural essence.”Footnote ¹⁰ The intrinsically martial character of the hypermasculine Sunni-Turkish nation was evoked via the exploits of the pre-Ottoman Seljuk and Ottoman Turkish empires. Of particular resonance was the 1071 Battle of Manzikert when the Seljuks defeated a Byzantine army, opening Anatolia to gradual Turkification. Celebrated by both right-wing and Islamist nationalists, this trope had been featured in textbooks since at least the original TIS in the 1980s.Footnote ¹¹

This “myth of the military nation”Footnote ¹² ready to defend against “mixing/hybridity … cultural interaction and differentiation”Footnote ¹³ likewise resonated with the coalition’s secular nationalists who had long celebrated combatants’ defense of the homeland (vatan) during World War I and the War of Independence between 1919 and 1923. After all, despite early Kemalists’ will to rupture with the Ottoman past (see Chapter 4), the secular nationalist repertoire was packed with stories about late Ottoman veterans (gazi) and martyrs (şehit) – both concepts with religious connotations.Footnote ¹⁴ In the context of the Cumhur alliance, this repertoire was woven into a wider narrative of Turkish-Muslim states’ epic heroism (destan) across the ages.

Thus, by the late 2010s, a synthesis of Islamist and right-wing secular, as well as leftist and “Atatürkist,” nationalisms situated the birth of the nation earlier than the original Kemalist emphasis on 1923. Instead, as Çınar and Taş trace, the “founding moment” was located in defiance of the Allied invasion at the Battle of Gallipoli, and resistance to occupation and the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres.Footnote ¹⁵ This (re)focus had empirical foundations. Historically, as Milli Görüş pundits had long pointed out,Footnote ¹⁶ Committees for the Defense of the Nation (Müdâfaa-i Millîye Cemiyeti) had thought of “national” resistance in Ottoman-Islamic terms, rallying to the defense of caliph, sultan, and empire. As such, the TIS 2.0 foregrounded “the anti-imperialist, anti-Western, and militaristic aspects”Footnote ¹⁷ of Mustafa Kemal Paşa as a war hero, but skipped his later cultural revolution. This emphasis enabled alliance partners to sidestep Islamist grievances over historic repression by republican-era Kemalists. Instead, anger was cultivated through the experience – intelligible to all Muslims in Turkey, practicing or otherwise – of the West’s neoimperial “double-standards.”

In sum, the TIS 2.0 “rekeyed” overlapping ideas that had long reverberated across ethnic and religious nationalism.Footnote ¹⁸ Belying any “secularist vs. Islamist” cleavage, a significant block of secular nationalistsFootnote ¹⁹ became reconciled to an Islamist leader, party, and those segments of the pro-religious public galvanized by the TIS 2.0.

8.2.3 Performing the TIS 2.0

Erdoğan, for his part, cultivated the TIS 2.0 via rousing public performances. One script that he brought dramatically to life aligned secular nationalist obsession over purity (of the blood) with Islamic fears of fitne (strife/disorder). Anxieties about fitne had helped to delegitimize the irreverent pluralism of Gezi protestors as an externally instigated attack on Turkey’s honor and sovereign integrity. The AKP-Gülenist feud also amplified angst about the indivisibility of the body politic. The experience, after all, had been traumatic for pro-religious communities, pitting family members against each other.

The TIS 2.0 solution was martial vigilance. As White puts it, “militarism is concerned with fears of weakness and boundary penetration. These fears are kept at bay through purity rituals and taboos that focus intensely on [demonizing] objects that are ‘out of place….” Fears of chaos and impurity served the “us” versus “them” of populist narratives,Footnote ²⁰ as well as the Cumhur coalition’s law-and-order agenda. With this emphasis on stability, the “AKP as change-maker” trope that had animated the party’s earlier agenda disappeared from sight.

A further and novel element of Erdoğan’s contribution to the TIS 2.0 built on earlier enactments of religious populism. This was his lively performances as caliph-sultan reincarnate. For instance, Erdoğan embraced association with Abdülhamid II. An adept of “long nineteenth century” geocultural politics, the sultan’s reinvention of the caliphate as a modern ideological instrument had helped him to retain power over three decades. To be sure, the historic Abdülhamid was more cautious than the risk-taking Erdoğan. But more important than historical accuracyFootnote ²¹ was reimagination of the sultan’s iron-fisted rule as noble service to the nascent Muslim-Turkish nation in the face of European machinations (like great power support for minority secessionism).Footnote ²² Celebrated in a popular miniseries, this reimagined Ottoman-Islamic nationalism contrasted with an earlier Erdoğan who, at least in his dialogue with Kurds until the mid-2010s, had invoked the Ottoman legacy in a multicultural if paternalistic vein.

Turco-Ottoman spectacle was curated at official receptions, on campaign stages, and via state-run media on multiple platforms. For example, the cast of Diriliş: Ertuğrul (Resurrection: Ertuğrul) frequently performed at AKP rallies. The popular soap opera celebrated the adventures of early Turkic gazi warriors at the dawn of the Ottoman dynasty in sync with the perennialist nationalism of the Cumhur coalition. It aligned, as such, with the TIS 2.0’s re-imagination of the ideal citizen as a prodigal “Ottoman son” or “children of Conquerors” with Turco-Islamic sensibilities.Footnote ²³

8.2.4 The TIS 2.0 in (Multi-)Regional Context

In addition to domestic applications, the TIS 2.0 evoked connections with the former imperial geography. This militarized sense of manifest destiny was audible in the irredentist timbre of the Cumhur alliance slogan “Büyük Türkiye” meaning “Great” but also “Greater Turkey.” Regionally, this informed a more assertive set of (multi-)regional policies at a world historic moment of global power shift. Indeed, not since the nineteenth century’s “Eastern Question” had Turkey’s environs experienced a power vacuum so conducive to “competitive regional power projection.” Geographically congruent with “historic Ottoman but also pan-Turanist lines,” Ankara’s expansive foreign policy was compatible with the “nurture of populist, militarist nationalism at home.”Footnote ²⁴

In terms of players, the EU, for its part, had lost almost all leverage. This was due to the moribund accession process and the rise of right-wing nationalism and Euroscepticism in Europe and Turkey alike.Footnote ²⁵ The July 2016 Brexit referendum only seemed to support anti-EU claims in Turkey and beyond regarding the Union – and “Europe’s” – inevitable decline. Meanwhile, Obama-era extraction of US forces from the Middle EastFootnote ²⁶ evolved after 2016 under President Trump into US allergy to America’s own liberal international order. Arguably acting as much on affective affinity as grand strategy, Trump gave US allies with authoritarian tendencies such as Erdoğan, as well as Egypt’s Abdel Fattah El-Sisi and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, ample room for maneuver.

US retrenchment presented Turkey’s coalition of secular and religious nationalists with unprecedented room to pursue the “strategic autonomy”Footnote ²⁷ for which many hankered.Footnote ²⁸ Revisionist regional policies included but were not limited to cross-border intervention vis-à-vis Kurdish momentum in the Middle East;Footnote ²⁹ attempts at defense procurement from Russia and China;Footnote ³⁰ fraternal support for Azerbaijan’s claims to Nagorno-Karabakh;Footnote ³¹ and the pursuit of naval power projection in the Eastern Mediterranean, upending two decades of détente with Greece.Footnote ³² From the Eurasianist perspective of some within the ethno-religious nationalist coalition, this last policy served the added benefit of muddying relations with NATO.Footnote ³³

Attempts at power projection in the Middle East were entangled, moreover, with concurrent maneuvers of other regional and great powers such as Iran and Russia.Footnote ³⁴ Turkey’s relations with Moscow had gained traction in the early and mid-2010s, as Russia flexed its fossil fuel muscles, the EU lost appeal, and Washington engaged with Kurds’ evolving role in the Middle East.Footnote ³⁵ Strongman affinity between Erdoğan and Putin also helped to sustain a relationship that weathered occasional crises.Footnote ³⁶ Ties were reinforced when Putin proved the first head of state to call during the coup attempt in 2016 as European and American leaders conspicuously hedged on the outcome. Russia, to be sure, was the senior partner in the relationship. Yet, Ankara often played a balancing game vis-à-vis Russian and Iranian ambitions. At times, it leaned toward them against the West. On other occasions, Turkey invoked its relationships, however troubled, with the EU, US, and NATO to check the moves of Eurasian counterparts.Footnote ³⁷

In addition to geopolitical jockeying, in a Turkey beholden to the TIS 2.0, “family resemblances” with other “revisionist former empires” across greater Eurasia – notably Russia, Iran, and China – became more visible.Footnote ³⁸ Each, for one, had served as the Oriental “Others” of European-dominated international society in the nineteenth century, and/or the US-led liberal order in the twentieth. For generations, resentment of this experience had been instilled through official and media narratives. Thus, societies were already primed to equate Western policies with (neo)imperialism, but read their own leaders’ revisionism as a righteous reclamation of world historic roles. Such sentiments were mobilized, in turn, by strategic-cum-performative leaders such as Erdoğan, Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, at the nexus of domestic and foreign policy.Footnote ³⁹

8.2.5 The Executive Presidency: A Critical, Anti-Pluralist Juncture

The actors, ideas, and contextual forces driving the Cumhur alliance came together around a 2017 referendum on constitutional amendments for an executive presidency. This systemic recalibration, Erdoğan argued, would allow a strong leader to restore Turkey to stability and its rightful place in the region and the world. Or, as Bargu puts it, if the failed coup and ensuing emergency rule marked a major rupture from the old regime, the presidential system offered a way to close the interregnum.Footnote ⁴⁰ The new order was to be enacted via the president’s very person.

Key features of the proposed system included the abolition of the office of the prime minister and its replacement with a president to be selected via popular vote alongside a new legislature every five years (or through snap elections, whichever came first). Voting was organized around a two-round system. This would allow for multiple candidates in the first round, with the frontrunner securing the presidency should they garner more than 50 percent of the vote. If no candidate passed the 50 percent threshold, the top two candidates would lock horns in a second round of voting.

The constitutional package, Ekim and Kirişçi argue, entailed at least three problematic dimensions: increase in presidential powers;Footnote ⁴¹ decrease in legislative powers;Footnote ⁴² and a tilting of the judiciary in favor of the president.Footnote ⁴³ While many of the proposed measures were found, prima facie, in other presidential systems, taken together in the Turkish context, the changes would shift checks and balances significantly in favor of the executive. Notable features included elimination of presidential nonpartisanship; the possibility of appointing over 70 percent of the country’s top judges; scenarios wherein the parliament would merely rubber stamp presidential initiatives; and a loopholeFootnote ⁴⁴ allowing for up to three five-year terms (which was more than double the extent system’s seven-year, single-term mandate).Footnote ⁴⁵

On April 16, 2017, a national referendum on the proposed system passed via 51.4 vs. 48.6 percent of the vote. Given that campaigning took place under emergency rule, the victory was quite slim. In addition to the government’s disproportionate resources, it actively suppressed critics. Observers with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) recorded problems such as “detentions and dismissals” during this period of “civil servants, judges, journalists and opposition party members,” and the recent closure of 158 media outlets.Footnote ⁴⁶ The referendum nevertheless paved the way for snap presidential elections that were called for the following year.

In response, the “opposition” proved “unexpectedly energized, eclectic, and united.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Its dynamism was due, in part, to the efforts of a cross-camp coalition builder, CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. The physically diminutive but determined leader had captured national attention with a three-week, 280-mile march in 2017. The catalyst had been the repeated prosecution of a critical journalist-turned-CHP parliamentarian. The result, however, was national coverage and galvanized participation, with the march drawing some two million participants.Footnote ⁴⁸

These efforts led to the Millet İttifakı (Nation Alliance) which formalized energies that had coalesced on the “no” side of the referendum. The general logic was that members would field their own candidates for the presidency but support each other in the event of a second-round runoff. The platform brought together the CHP and İYİ Party.Footnote ⁴⁹ Another partner was the electorally minor but symbolically significant Islamist Felicity (Saadet) Party. This was because its leader, who hailed from the Milli Görüş tradition of political Islam, used the language of political pluralism to protest unbridled presidential power. The alliance’s bridge-building experiment was reflected in the notion of “millet” itself – a term that evoked right-leaning conceptions of “nation” more than the left-leaning “halk” or “people” centered in the CHP’s own name.Footnote ⁵⁰ The choice, as such, signaled Kılıçdaroğlu’s attempt to appeal to right-wing and Islamist critics of the government’s rollback of democracy.

These innovations notwithstanding, on June 24, 2018, Erdoğan carried the presidential contest in the first round, with 52.6 percent. The outcome reflected Esen and Gumuscu’s categorization of Turkey as “competitive authoritarian.”Footnote ⁵¹ On the “competitive” side, victory was a function of Erdoğan’s gravitas vis-à-vis the other candidates. The AKP also flexed its bona fide organizational muscles to get out the grassroots vote. On these counts, a key takeaway for the Millet alliance was that under the new presidential system, it was crucial to rally around a common candidate in the first round – rather than wait for a second that might not materialize.

On the “authoritarian” side of the equation, there were major problems with freeness and fairness. Like the 2017 referendum, elections were held under emergency rule (which was lifted less than a month after the elections wrapped). In addition to immense resource and communication advantages, opposition mobilization was actively obstructed. One candidate – the HDP’s Selahattın Demirtaş – campaigned from prison. Significant irregularities also were alleged in and beyond the Kurdish-dominated eastern provinces.Footnote ⁵² On these counts, it became clear that opposition actors needed to develop strategies to counterbalance the preelection playing field and monitor outcomes on election days.

The vote, in short, was a major victory for the anti-pluralist coalition. A watershed in Turkey’s trajectory, it marked the eclipse of an almost 150-year tradition of parliamentary democracy. As this book has shown, parliamentarism was a product of nineteenth-century coalitions that had mobilized Islamo-liberal referents, bequeathing to later generations parliamentary institutions and political culture. This had reverberated in what I called the “embedded liberalism” of Kemalist republicanism. Embedded liberalism, in turn, was appropriated by subsequent alliances for pluralization in the multiparty period, including the early AKP. What, then, were prospects for pluralism – political and otherwise – moving forward?

8.3.1 Municipal Movements: A Critical Juncture for the New Pluralizers

An opportunity to challenge the anti-pluralist regime soon arose with municipal elections slated for March 2019. The practice had deep roots in locally elected provincial councils dating back to the early Tanzimat period, predating the first Ottoman constitution and parliament by thirty years.Footnote ⁵³ In contemporary Turkey, local (yerel) elections are held simultaneously in cities across the country every five years. The “local” designation notwithstanding, such elections were nationally significant, especially in the 2020s, because over 75 percent of Turkey’s circa 85 million people were urban.Footnote ⁵⁴ As a result, the demographics and budgets of large cities rivaled those of small countries.Footnote ⁵⁵ Istanbul, in particular, occupied a well-networked node within the globalized economy. Producing two-thirds of national industrial output,Footnote ⁵⁶ the city was a conduit of investment, trade, knowledge, and people at the interstices of the international, regional, and local.Footnote ⁵⁷

Sociologically too, cities are animated by energies generated through everyday interactions – or “thrown-togetherness”Footnote ⁵⁸ - between diverse people. Fraught for sure, urban encounters can generate ad hoc, issue-based cooperation across identity and ideological groups. These relationships, especially when repeated,Footnote ⁵⁹ can engender new forms of conviviality despite polarization at the national level.Footnote ⁶⁰

In addition to these administrative, economic, and socio-spatial features,Footnote ⁶¹ municipalities offered electoral opportunities. For example, Erdoğan’s kairotic acumen was not necessarily transferable to AKP municipal candidates. Perhaps to compensate, the party had engaged in extensive gerrymandering prior to the previous round of 2014 municipal elections.Footnote ⁶²

The Istanbul mayorship was the grand prize. Home to some 20 percent of Turkey’s population, and with its almost metaphysical resonance in neo-Ottoman nostalgia, Istanbul pulsed as the site from which Erdoğan’s own rise had been launched. Ankara’s mayorship was likewise coveted for the material and symbolic resources that accrued to whoever governed the capital of the Turkish nation-state.

Within this urban forcefield, there was appetite for change. The pro-secular middle classes who made up significant swathes of the urban electorate were fed up with Islamization of public spaces under AKP mayors. Furthermore, pro-Kurdish urban voters, including millions of migrants to metropoles in central and western Turkey, were frustrated with the central government’s policy of dismissing (and oftentimes imprisoning) elected pro-Kurdish mayors in the southest of the country, replacing them with appointed officials (kayyum). There was cross-cutting disillusionment, moreover, with the corruption, nepotism, and colorful provocations associated with the long-serving, prior AKP mayors of Istanbul and Ankara.Footnote ⁶³ The AKP tried to press reset by fielding high-punching new candidates, especially in Istanbul, where recent prime minister, Binali Yıldırım, sought the mayorship.

But Yıldırım and his Ankara counterpart faced dynamic challengers from a rising generation of CHP leaders. Both challengers were mayors of subdivisions of their municipalities. Little-known but charming Ekrem İmamoğlu straddled the center-left and center-right while winking at Kurds. Mansur Yavaş was a well-regarded lawyer and politician who had left the MHP to join the CHP in order to contest the Ankara mayorship back in the 2014 elections. At that time, victory had eluded him by a single percentage point in a contest with notable irregularities.Footnote ⁶⁴ These included a blackout during voting (which the energy minister had blamed on a cat disrupting the electric grid).Footnote ⁶⁵

The campaigns, particularly in Istanbul, sought to mobilize voters by channeling a seemingly “counterintuitive”Footnote ⁶⁶ message given the intensely polarized context: radical love. The well-run campaigns reflected lessons learned from the prior, underwhelming performance of CHP-backed candidates – fighting polarizing fire with polarizing fire was a self-defeating strategy for a coalition that did not yet command a majority. Alliances, however, could be game-changing. A CHP pamphlet aimed at candidates laid out the new discursive/performative strategy. Featuring a modestly dressed, proud, and happy family, the pamphlet included an upbeat Atatürk quotation distinctive from sterner utterances invoked in, say, the anti-pluralist, post-1980 Atatürkist repertoire: “The only means with which to make people happy, bring them together, make them love each other, [and] which will help them meet their material and spiritual needs, is movement and energy.” A statement from Kılıçdaroğlu reinforced the solidaristic call for social and political pluralism: “It does not behoove us to be hateful. We will live as siblings. Arm-in-arm, shoulder-to-shoulder, we will contest.” Ensuing language likewise departed from older CHP rhetoric when, as documented in Chapter 5, prominent figures associated with party had justified the extrajudicial murder of a minority activist for allegedly insulting Turkish blood. In contrast, the new booklet declared: “We may speak Turkish, Kurdish, Laz, Arabic, [or] English but the important thing is to speak ‘humanly’.” Candidates were enjoined to remain unflustered in the face of adversity, that is, to “let their faces laugh.”Footnote ⁶⁷ This “depolarizing and inclusive campaign discourse … captivated” the CHP’s “core constituency,”Footnote ⁶⁸ among others fed up at being the objects of populist demonization. Thus, the alignment bridged İYİ party allies on the nationalist right and leftist Kurds who already had rallied behind Demirtaş’s pluralistic language in the 2015 national elections.

Ideas, however, as this book has repeatedly shown, are a necessary but insufficient cause of transformative outcomes. Rather, ideas are impactful when harnessed by strategic-cum-performative actors in response to contingent opportunities. In this case, İmamoğlu proved to be highly “conscious of his language,” emphasizing “connection, shared values, freedom for all,” and an expansive idea of “the people” that included “a broad range of [social] diversity.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Addressing the economy, for example, he exuded Özal’s knack for fusing the languages of liberal good governance and neoliberal efficiency with empathy for ordinary people’s pain at a time of economic downturn.Footnote ⁷⁰ Socially too, İmamoğlu sought to embrace pietistic Turks, while celebrating secular women. The latter’s concerns were simultaneously addressed by the fearless Canan Kaftancıoğlu, head of the CHP’s Istanbul branch, and a chief architect of İmamoğlu’s campaign and electoral coalition. İmamoğlu’s performative flair and Kaftancıoğlu’s steel nerves would play a critical role as Turkey voted in the elections that – even for a country characterized by almost continuous electoral dramaFootnote ⁷¹ – proved exceptionally nail-biting.

On March 31, 2019, the Cumhur and the Millet alliance concluded tense campaigns for 30 metropolitan and 1,351 district municipalities. The HDP, for its part, lent tacit support to the Millet coalition by not fielding its own candidates in Istanbul and Ankara. Millet candidates, for all the positive framing vis-à-vis allies, alleged gross governmental corruption. Cumhur candidates tarred opponents as “foreign and terrorist” proxies. The linkage was graphically suggested – if logically tenuous – when footage was shown at several Erdoğan-led AKP rallies of a recent mass shooting of Muslims by a white supremacist in New Zealand. In this hothouse electoral climate, five were killed in voting-related incidents, including Millet coalition Islamists – a polling station official and observer – who were slain by an AKP member. Nevertheless, on election day, ballots across the country were counted under the watchful eyes of monitors from the contending parties and civic volunteer groups such as Oy ve Ötesi (Vote and Beyond). The country watched transfixed as vote counts flicked across TV screens. Defying preelection opinion polls, the CHP flipped most major cities including Istanbul.Footnote ⁷² The HDP, for its part, swept much of southeastern Turkey. The outcome was a clear repudiation of the governing coalition by urban Turkey, bringing some 60 percent of the population under opposition municipal rule.Footnote ⁷³

The drama, however, was far from finished. İmamoğlu had pulled past Yıldırım with only 13,000 votes – a drop in Istanbul’s ocean of 16 million souls – when an information blackout was imposed. The blackout was maintained for weeks, as recounts and AKP allegations of irregularities and fraud were vetted. İmamoğlu nevertheless prevailed with some 24,000 votes. Procedurally, he therefore was authorized to govern on April 17, by the Supreme Electoral Council (Yüksek Seçim Kurulu, YSK). However, at Erdoğan’s insistence, the YSK annulled the elections five days later, setting snap reelections (albeit only for the metropolitan municipality and not for sub-municipal offices that AKP candidates had won). The move recalled the rerun of the 2015 national elections that had not favored the ruling party. Also evoking recent electoral controversies, the YSK did not validate HDP victories across southeastern Turkey, giving the seats to AKP candidates instead.

Voters counter-mobilized in response, as İmamoğlu, indeed, “let his face laugh,” that is, maintained a calm and resolute aura. On the evening that his mayoral mandate was rescinded, he declared:

This message gained momentum in a kairotic moment when a youth chasing İmamoğlu’s rerun campaign caravan called out “everything will be very good” (herşeyi çok güzel olacak). In a video of the interaction, İmamoğlu was visibly moved, declaring “this belief is all we need” and instructing his team to engage the youth.Footnote ⁷⁵ The phrase – which rolls off the tongue in Turkish – was then centered in campaign materials, helping to energize popular engagement. İmamoğlu’s knack for storytelling was complimented by skilled, visual self-presentation in the age of social media. He proved able, for instance, to project traits such as “statesmanship” and “mass appeal,” but also “compassion” and “ordinariness” via pointedly inclusive postures.Footnote ⁷⁶ İmamoğlu thus capitalized on the displacement of critical audiences to digital platforms such as Instagram after the AKP monopolized traditional media. Used by 52 percent of Istanbullites, İmamoğlu’s approval rating soared from 49 to 57 percent among platform users during the rerun campaign.Footnote ⁷⁷ Against this strategic-cum-performative intervention, AKP candidate Yıldırım was relatively invisible in a campaign dominated by Erdoğan and his electoral machinery.

By thus seizing contingent moments of inspiration during this slow-motion critical juncture, which unfolded between March 31 and June 23, a savvy political actor channeled inclusive ideas and favorable contextual factors (such as incumbent fatigue and the sputtering economy) toward an irrefutable victory. With the final tally in, İmamoğlu gathered over 800,000 new voters, increasing his overall vote share by 5.43 percent. In tandem with the opposition’s sweep of fifteen cities, to the ruling coalition’s net loss of five, the outcome suggested that pluralizing alliances – at least in metropolitan areas – were viable. In short, the “‘competitive’ within competitive authoritarianism” was affirmed.

Boosting opposition confidence, the municipal elections created space for relatively “democratic enclaves”Footnote ⁷⁸ via which to reinvent politics at the municipal scale (including opportunities for non-Cumhur supporters to embark upon civil service careers). The outcome was suggestive, moreover, of “springboard” opportunities for “subnational executives” to act as “chinks in the armor … of authoritarian rule.”Footnote ⁷⁹ In this dynamic context, diverse cohorts mobilized for greater pluralism, even as their visions were in tension with one another. In so doing, they gathered the seventh major coalition for pluralization since the late Ottoman era.

8.3.2 (Pro-secular and Conservative) Youth

A key cohort energized by the municipal elections was youth. This was because the generation that had experienced the AKP’s economic “miracle” of the 2000s – when growth was robust but inflation, currency, and national debt stabilized – was now middle-aged. The younger generation, by way of contrast, was coming of age under deteriorating conditions. In 2018, for instance, official unemployment was 11 percent, and youth unemployment double that of other OECD countries. University graduates, moreover, were less likely to be gainfully employed than their nongraduate counterparts (with women graduates fairing worst).Footnote ⁸⁰ New voters also “struggle[d] with an increasingly dysfunctional educational system that offer[ed] little professional prospects.”Footnote ⁸¹

The neoliberal privatization of social services also favored pro-religious constituencies who benefitted from pro-religious philanthropy and participated in the charity “markets of Islam.”Footnote ⁸² Such networks tended to exclude pro-secular Turkish and Kurdish, as well as Alevi youth. Bread and butter concerns were compounded by status frustrations. Youth’s dismal prospects contrasted with conspicuous consumption among the AKP’s new haute bourgeoisie whose lavish lifestyles contrasted with the rhetoric of piety. This tension was brought vividly into focus when the cocaine-addled antics of a rising AKP star went viral on social media.Footnote ⁸³

Many young people were also disaffected by the Islamization of educationFootnote ⁸⁴ as part of Erdoğan’s explicit goal, stated in 2012, of “raising a pious generation.” Under this rubric, sundry restrictions had been imposed on recreational activities deemed to be promiscuous. A sense of being stifled was exacerbated since the open lifestyles of youth counterparts elsewhere could easily be followed on social media. Thus, the universal youth tendency to question established authority intersected with class and cultural cleavages. As Alemdaroğlu shows, “the AKP’s problem with youth” had political implications: The party’s share of the eighteen to twenty-five-year-old vote was lower than both the HDP and MHP’s, at between 5 and 10 percent under its national-level support.Footnote ⁸⁵

Popular culture provided spaces for resistance while “signaling to others … that they were not alone.”Footnote ⁸⁶ A case in point was a fifteen-minute track by some twenty rappers released less than three months after the municipal elections. Entitled “I Can’t Be Silent,” the clip racked in millions of viewers instantaneously, receiving 57 million clicks within four years.Footnote ⁸⁷ Tackling outstanding concerns in the idiom of self-reflexive critique, the message was intelligible to some youth across all camps. Coverage included ecological degradation and animal rights, violence against women, hopelessness and suicide, freedom of expression and media repression, nepotism, corruption, and hateful language, among many other topics relevant to pluralism.

At the same time, the clip was exclusionary toward Syrian refugees and their prospective naturalization.Footnote ⁸⁸ Anti-refugee sentiment had been rising in a context where many perceived the government to care less about its own citizens than the 3.6 million Syrians who Turkey hosted for both humanitarian reasons and as leverage vis-à-vis the EU.Footnote ⁸⁹ In this regard, the video also showcased the challenge – pertinent to all alliances – of bringing together a multiplicity of perspectives whose visions of pluralization never align seamlessly. Furthermore, the hierarchies that characterize both pluralizing and anti-pluralist platforms were attested to by the participation of only one female contributor (who sang about women’s concerns) and one Kurdish contributor (who enjoined listeners to question their identities in the idiom of metaphysics).

Rebellion was also found among young people at the heart of the entrenching conservative establishment. One form this took was deism – defined as “a form of agnosticism that rejects organized religion” – even among students and graduates of theological schools.Footnote ⁹⁰ This “flight from organized religion” by the “younger generation” in the late 2010s was bolstered by the interventions of well-established professors and theologians whose emic critiques of Sunni orthodoxy attested “to the striking diversity of voices within the larger Islamic canon.”Footnote ⁹¹ Critical theologians, for instance, offered historicist interpretations of the canon that had become accessible beyond small circles of religious scholars with the widening of public spaces for Islamic debates.Footnote ⁹² As evidence for the deist trend emerged across a series of reports, surveys, interview-based studies, anecdotal accounts, and anonymous confessions, Erdoğan slammed the Minister of Education, while the Diyanet chief castigated the philosophy itself as “perverse and heretic.”Footnote ⁹³ Yet, Furman and Akyıldız argue, condemnation only stimulated social media debate, forging a “temporary dialogical space for the … enunciation of ‘deconversion narratives’ from Islam,” and the “expression of grassroots civil activism” vis-à-vis the powerful Diyanet.Footnote ⁹⁴

Such behavior was animated by dismay at the aforementioned gap between performative piety and problematic practices. For instance, when public preachers seeking a spot in the “24-hour news cycle” defended practices that ranged from “horrific” (e.g., pedophilia, child marriage, and spousal abuse) to “silly” (e.g., condemnation of mixed-gender elevators), “the educated and highly globalized younger generation” of conservative youth were mortified.Footnote ⁹⁵

In effect, the “merging of political Islam and the Turkish state” project, that is, what I have called the TIS 2.0, proved something of a “bittersweet”Footnote ⁹⁶ or “pyrrhic victory”Footnote ⁹⁷ for pietistic citizens. This was because just as spaces opened for public expressions of religiosity with, for instance, the rescinding of the headscarf ban, conformity was demanded to a unitary and politicized vision of religiosity. As a result, the AKP’s “Islamic youth project,” as Lüküslü puts it, resembled “its Kemalist predecessor” in its homogenization of youth as an

This erasure of the “diverse meanings underlying Islamic ethical practices” impelled a search for alternatives. These included a reputed rise in “hijabi atheism,” and unveiling among some “pious Muslim women” searching “for their own subjectivity without falling into the binary of Islamist and secularist political projects.”Footnote ⁹⁹ As analysts of the practice vigorously underscore, unveiling should not be read through Orientalist-cum-Occidentalist lenses as pitting Islamic versus secularist commitments. Rather, unveiling is informed by complex intersections of “moral ambivalence, religious doubt and non-belief.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Some women, for instance, experienced “religion fatigue”: exhaustion at the demands of self-presentation in a polarized and relatively disenchanted – in the Weberian sense – society where their appearance was expected to support the Islamist authorities. Unveiling, as such, offered an “intricate form of political and religious agency expressed from within an insecure, vulnerable position” that resisted the “hoisting” of political symbolism onto young women.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Online fora, as Sözen shows, offered further sites for these renegotiations of modern selfhood. On religious websites, for example, taboos about dating were questioned not “from a pronounced secular position” but as a sort of search for “love and intimacy” indicative of “a desire oriented towards the other, with the possibility of transforming the self and other.”Footnote ¹⁰²

8.3.3 Women’s and LGBTQ+ Activism

A gendered search for relational engagement toward “coalitional solidarities”Footnote ¹⁰³ also informed activism within an energized women’s movement. Pluralizing alliances, after all, often coalesce in response to common challenges or opponents. For women, a “crucial domain” of cross-cutting concern was the “normalization” of “soaring levels” of gender-based violence in political discourse and everyday practices, with “relative impunity for perpetrators” (see Figure 8.1).Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Indicatively, between 2013 and 2021, 3,035 femicides were reported,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ in a context where 38 percent of women reported physical or sexual violence in their lifetime.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Such statistics, in tandem with problems accessing labor markets and political representation, contributed to Turkey’s poor performance in gender equality indices. In the World Economic Forum’s 2023 index, for example, the country ranked 129 out of 146 just two spots above Saudi Arabia.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Figure 8.1 Graffiti from a derelict structure in a central Istanbul neighborhood featuring an anguished woman.

(Alamy)

Women’s anguish was amplified by the capture of gender-based violence on widely circulated cellphone and CCTV videos. Imagery was impossible to unsee (or unhear), such as Emine Bulut’s harrowing cry, “I don’t want to die,” as her ex-husband fatally stabbed her in front of their daughter.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Adding insult to injury was the defense, noted above, of such acts by ultraconservative pundits who lobbied Ankara in the language of “family values” to rescind key legislation protecting women and children. Women’s anger came to a head during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Erdoğan responded to ultraconservative calls, pulling out of the “Istanbul Convention”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ in March 2021. An instrument under the Council of Europe, the widely ratified treaty aimed to prevent gender-based violence and promote gender equality (Article 1).

Erdoğan’s move was commensurate with increasingly systematic attempts to reframe women’s role in terms of putatively natural gender complementarity (fıtrat) rather than equality. Echoing the pro-natalism of right-wing populists around the globe, Turkey’s emergent gender regime privileged women’s reproductive role over economic or professional advancement. The approach overlapped with the TIS 2.0 expectation that individual interests be sublimated to the national. This “sacralization” of neo-traditional family roles via “religious tropes” pitted “venerated women” as “mothers, sisters, and wives” against “repudiated feminists,” namely, “liberals, leftists, and political dissenters.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Thus, women’s and LGBTQ+ activists joined the ranks of the unitary national project’s constitutive “Others.” Dehumanizing language, in turn, reinforced the normalization of gender-based violence. The linkage was underscored by statements such as Erdoğan’s 2016 quip commending those who during the coup attempt had died in defense of the government: “One should die like a man, not like a Madam.”Footnote ¹¹¹

Alarmed, a number of activists within Turkey’s well-organized women’s movement sought to work with – rather than against – the diversity that characterized women’s ranks.Footnote ¹¹² Participants included, but were far from limited to Turkish, Kurdish, Kemalist, liberal, and progressive feminists. They were joined by some religiously observant women who critiqued authoritarian populism and its gendered thrust. Positioning explicitly as “Muslim feminists,” they sought to “widen the spaces for Muslim women within the women’s movement,”Footnote ¹¹³ participating in protests and commenting as public intellectuals.Footnote ¹¹⁴ These “joint efforts of secular and religious feminists,” Yabancı and Maritato argue, “created a culture of solidarity” that challenged “secular-Muslim polarization … through emergent norms and political frames developed in the course of collective mobilization.”Footnote ¹¹⁵

Calls to transcend habitual “binary approaches”Footnote ¹¹⁶ were articulated in a context where third- and fourth-wave feminist notions of “intersectionality” and “alliance” may have made cooperation more intuitive than it was for previous generations. Male allies also were welcomed. In some instances, men were active participants. One mediatic move was a 2015 march where men carrying babies wore skirts. During annual “Feminist Night Marches,” however, male allies were asked to support the cause through their non-presence as women took back the night.

To be sure – and as with all cross-camp coalitions – hierarchies and differentiated priorities characterized women’s activism.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Kurdish women’s role, for instance, was complicated by crackdowns on the broader Kurdish movement after the 2015 elections and 2016 coup attempt. Nevertheless, under such conditions, an activist argued, “women are left with no choice but to strengthen their alliances.”Footnote ¹¹⁸

The result was “a tactical and inventive repertoire” including “legal activism, local-level deliberation … self-help, and contentious action”Footnote ¹¹⁹ like mass protests. Annual Women’s Day (March 8th) marches gathered thousands who braved tear gas, rubber bullets, and the possibility of detention for a sense of solidarity and power in numbers. Attracting international coverage, protest repertoires fused symbols of the transnational women’s movement, like the color purple, with messages specific to women’s predicament in Turkey. Placards recalled the irreverent imagery of the Gezi Park protests and women’s call – then and since – for a “post-patriarchal state.”Footnote ¹²⁰ For example, a 2019 protest placard which provoked particular consternation in conservative circles because it was held by a visibly Muslim, feminist activist read: “Are you Allah? Down with your family.”Footnote ¹²¹

Also evocative of Gezi was support for LGBTQ+ causes at women’s marches. As covered in Chapter 6, the 2013 protests gained momentum when they converged with preplanned Pride marches.Footnote ¹²² This mass if transient site of “prejudice reduction … through togetherness experiences”Footnote ¹²³ reverberated across the decade as the government shut down spaces for LGBTQ+ activism on sundry pretexts after 2015. Homosexuality remained legal. But discursive demonization, like Erdoğan’s description of it as a “poison” and “calamity that threatens the survival of our society”, translated into online and physical violence.Footnote ¹²⁴ Some LGBTQ+ individuals continued to protest at considerable risk including Islamic queer activists;Footnote ¹²⁵ others shut down outward-facing expressions of sexual identity.Footnote ¹²⁶

That being said, “repression” can provoke “a moral and emotional reaction from bystanders,” which is “mobilizing.”Footnote ¹²⁷ Sexual minorities found allies in left-leaning political movements whose programs, in any case, were gender inclusive. Cases in point were the newly founded Worker’s Party of Turkey (Türkiye İşçi Partisi) and the HDP (the patriarchal conservativism of significant swathes of Kurdish society notwithstanding). LGBTQ+ activism likewise resonated with the progressive wing of the CHP, whose Gezi-inflected language of radical love encompassed, for figures such as Kaftancıoğlu, sexual, ethnic, and religious minorities. That being said, within İmamoglu’s Istanbul municipality, sympathy was circumscribed by pragmatism given constant sabotage by national authorities, and the coalition-building strategy vis-à-vis conservatives.Footnote ¹²⁸

8.3.4 Universities

Another site of intersectional solidarity, which built on MillennialFootnote ¹²⁹ and Generation ZFootnote ¹³⁰ uptake of queer causes globally, was student and faculty activism. This pattern was affirmed in protests that began in January 2021 at the unpopular appointment of a pro-government rector to Boğaziçi University – among the country’s most prestigious. Boğaziçi, Turam argues, had long nurtured a culture of “pluralism” that “like the city of Istanbul, accommodates striking cultural and identity-based diversity,” as well as “political commitment to democratic rights and universal liberties.”Footnote ¹³¹

The link with LGBTQ+ causes was forged when protest events regarding the rector included an exhibit featuring a provocative poster of the Kaaba – among the most sacred sites in Islam – adorned with LGBTQ+ flags. Security forces responded by raiding the campus, detaining several students who Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu called “LGBT perverts.” As protests and arrests spiraled, many within the university community adopted the rainbow flag as one symbol of resistance.Footnote ¹³² More broadly, defiance took forms like daily faculty vigils on the campus lawn that “embodied … resistance” toward fostering “counter or dissident body politics … as an arena of democratic struggle interconnected to other social struggles for equality and liberty in the country and beyond .”Footnote ¹³³

8.3.5 Ethnic and Religious Minorities

In addition to the electoral potential of youth and women’s support, ethnic and religious minorities were demographically significant blocks. As covered in Chapter 6, in its 2015 election campaign, the pro-Kurdish HDP proved the first party to tap the energies unleashed by Gezi. The strategy generated a potentially game-changing juncture in the May 2015 elections, when HDP performance prevented the AKP from forming a single-party government. At that time, however, the mainstream opposition had failed to seize the opportunity. On the contrary – and attesting also to the fragility of cross-camp alliances – Kurds’ triumph had pushed the MHP from the opposition into AKP arms.

Alevis – Kurdish and Turkish alike – were probable HDP or CHP voters given that their heterodox religiosity was anathema to the Sunni thrust of both the Turkish-Islamic and Turkish-Islamist syntheses. That said, the CHP’s simultaneous alliance with the right-wing İYİ Party demanded a difficult balancing act that figures such as Kılıçdaroğlu – who was Alevi himself – and İmamoğlu strove to manage.

Meanwhile, the HDP also offered a platform for smaller minority groups. To be sure, its platform was plagued by legal challenges like the stripping of party deputies’ immunity, and the incarceration of many of its leaders and activists after 2016. Nevertheless, figures such as Garo Paylan, a deputy of Armenian descent and HDP cofounder,Footnote ¹³⁴ envisaged the party’s pro-Kurdish agenda as “a necessary step to find a solution to all minority questions in Turkey, including the Armenian question.”Footnote ¹³⁵ In other words, Paylan sought to de-compartmentalize ethnic and religious minority grievances and instead seek redress holistically. This position contrasted with the pro-AKP stances of several older Armenian and non-Muslim figures who had nested their activism in the democratization of the 2000s, and minority “openings” of the early 2010s. Paylan took a more assertive approach. In April 2016, for instance, he brought placards to parliament commemorating thirteen Ottoman Armenian deputies killed in 1915 whose fate he urged lawmakers to research.Footnote ¹³⁶ The move sought to put two discursive fields into conversation: a Turkish context where the term “genocide” remained criminalizable, and an international context, including the US, where the language was increasingly normalized via adoption by legislatures and heads of state.

Non-Muslim civil society such as the Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos and the Hrant Dink Foundation also engaged in memory work. The focus was not necessarily on national-level reckonings, but rather on individual memories and family histories. This minority repertoire, Tambar argues, included a vision of intercommunal “friendship” as a frame for solidarity. Distinct from the cosmopolitan emphasis on mutual recognition, the goal was not to transcend but to affirm participants’ “thick” memories and identities.Footnote ¹³⁷

8.3.6 Environmentalists

Critique from – and alliances across – marginalized groups also percolated in the arena of environmental politics. A case in point was the resistance of several rural communities to the encroachment of extractive industries such as timber and mining. Resistance predated the AKP.Footnote ¹³⁸ But the party’s signature “hyper-developmentalism”Footnote ¹³⁹ informed confrontations across the country, including AKP strongholdsFootnote ¹⁴⁰ such as the Black Sea region from which Erdoğan originated. To head off government-industry partnerships that sought to “open public lands and natural resources for unbridled extraction,”Footnote ¹⁴¹ local activists invoked indigenous credentials. In the case of an antidevelopment initiative in the Black Sea town of Artvin, for example, protestors read poetry and performed traditional dances in attempts to rally local support. A sixty-three-year-old villager, grandmother, and leader of the initiative declared: “We have lived here all our lives. Who are those governors … who ‘call us looters’. I am ‘the people’ itself, and I am here to defend my habitat.”Footnote ¹⁴²

If intermittent successes were galvanizing, outrage at failures – like the 2014 Soma explosion, where over 300 miners were killed – likewise informed what Canefe calls a “new wave of civil disobedience movements.” Eschewing strong “political and ethno-religious identities” as the “symbolic framework for mobilizing public protests,” emergent environmentalist tactics included “diffused and non-centric form of political organization … heavy reliance on communication technologies, embrace [of] ad-hoc methods, and [the forging of] easy links with more than one particular issue.” Urban and (trans)national environmental activists, for instance, lent support as allies and analysts, albeit with mixed results.Footnote ¹⁴³ The ability to connect with wider causes was boosted by growing awareness of Turkey’s accelerating ecological crisis as two decades of growth-driven policies collided with climate change.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

The visual and discursive repertoire generated by both rural and urban environmentalism resonated with other actors’ attempts at coalition-building. The Millet alliance, for one, drew not only on the legacy of Gezi, with its environmentalist origins, but also on the tree-hugging grandmas of rural protests. Images of the latter, in particular, helped to confer “authenticity” to an opposition who was portrayed in the populist narrative as culturally alien. Environmental causes, as such, were incorporated into good governance pledges to deliver rule of law, transparency, and accountability.

8.3.7 Contesting the Contesters

As a diverse, opposition alignment favoring pluralization coalesced around multiple causes, pro-government civil society responded. This was evident in a paradox of civil society noted by Yabancı,Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Gümrükçü,Footnote ¹⁴⁶ and others: namely, the fact that while civil society qualitatively deteriorated under the AKP, with Freedom House ranking the country “not free” after 2018,Footnote ¹⁴⁷ quantitatively, the number of registered associations actually expanded.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Empirically, an explanation for this paradox could be the mainstreaming of tarikat activities.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Conceptually, however, the qualitative–quantitative gap was intelligible by recognizing that while civil society can support pluralizing activism, it is also a site of co-option.Footnote ¹⁵⁰As Antonio Gramsci seminally argued, civil society serves as a crucial site and mechanism for the internalization and projection of hegemonic projects.

In this regard, pro-government civic actors were incentivized to cultivate AKP-friendly state–society relations. Critical actors, by way of contrast, faced “legal, administrative, and extralegal measures that restrict[ed] operations and resources … forc[ing them] to choose between marginalization or co-optation.”Footnote ¹⁵¹ A major inflection point in the “mutual constitution of illiberal civil society and neo-authoritarianism”Footnote ¹⁵² was the organization of large scale “Respect the National Will” rallies as counterprotests to the 2013 Gezi mobilizations. A series of mass rallies followed, especially after the failed coup attempt in 2016. Stimulating a sense of collective purpose and catharsis, pro-government demonstrations opened spaces for “autocratic mobilization,” while raising the cost of “collective action” by critics.Footnote ¹⁵³

The closure – and selective reopening – of physical spaces was replayed in discursive spaces where pro-government civil society sought to foster an alternative episteme.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ In addition to situating “technicians of opinion”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ in traditional and social media, resources were available for academic knowledge production aligned with government agendas.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Efforts to support participation in the new, Islamo-nationalist normal were especially salient in fields such as youth, women, family, and social policy.

That said, government-aligned civic work, Zencerci shows, entailed interpretive and creative agency.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ For example, according to Kütük-Kuriş, “Islamist women” may “not always choose to defend gender interests if it means withdrawing from their movements’ larger political interest,” but they can and do exercise “critical agency” vis-à-vis the agendas of “male-governed Islamist movements.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸

Attesting to pluralizing propensities due to intra- and inter-camp diversity, AKP figures complained about the challenges of cultivating conformity. This challenge was confirmed when prominent Islamists such as former foreign and prime minister Ahmet Davutoğlu founded his own Future (Gelecek) Party in 2019 and former minister of the economy Ali Babacan founded the Democracy and Progress (DEVA Partisi) Party in 2020. Both parties would join the Millet alliance, affirming Kılıçdaroğlu’s attempts, since at least 2014, to recruit prominent Islamists such as Mehmet Bekaroğlu, who served as CHP vice chair responsible for public relations. As elections approached, the CHP would also field several hijabi candidates.

8.4.1 Context, Actors, and Ideas

With all eyes on the prize of presidential elections (and concurrent legislative elections as per the new system’s rules), contestation between champions of the TIS 2.0 and would-be pluralizers gained intensity. Coalitions also negotiated tense, intra-alliance terms of cooperation amid dramatic contextual developments.

First among contextual factors was the COVID-19 pandemic. In the language of complex systems, the pandemic was a “singularity” – a global-level critical juncture that impacted all of the international system’s constituent national systems simultaneously. That said, every country’s experience was structured by its own initial conditions (i.e., its own entangled agential, ideational, and contextual parameters when the pandemic hit). Confronting the complex challenges of Covid, decision-makers rolled the dice on unprecedented strategies.Footnote ¹⁵⁹

Turkey, like all countries, suffered from the pandemic trade-off between preventing contagion and economic activity. Lost revenue from life-blood sectors such as tourism and hospitality compounded preexisting problems. These included high unemployment and widespread labor market informality.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ The primary cause of economic pain was (hyper-)inflation in conjunction with a down-spiraling currency. The latter was associated with Erdoğan’s insistence on keeping interest rates low despite rising prices. This worried investors, especially when he fired a series of Central Bank governors and appointed his son-in-law as finance minister (2018–2020). State banks proceeded to deplete foreign currency reserves, spending 128.3 billion dollars in a futile attempt to prop up the lira without touching interest rates.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Turkey thus also risked default on its large current account deficit. The result was that citizens who, on January 1, 2010, had needed 1.5 Turkish lira to purchase 1 US dollar had to pay 18.7 lira for the same dollar exactly thirteen years later.Footnote ¹⁶² And while a weak lira helped exporters, who were an important constituency of the president,Footnote ¹⁶³ ordinary people sunk into poverty. Given these painful realities, the opposition viewed the economy, which was once the AKP’s strongest suit, as Erdoğan’s Achilles heel.

But pro-government commentators pushed back. Appealing to older voters who remembered both the prosperous 2000s and pre-AKP economic dysfunction, they pointed to tangible outcomes such as infrastructural development. They also touted emerging high tech where the drone company of another presidential son-in-law was making an international splash. The government expanded its economic populism significantly, distributing benefits beyond its core voters. A notable policy was the granting of pension benefits to over two million people irrespective of age or politics, a move that came with an estimated price tag of 5.35 billion dollars.Footnote ¹⁶⁴

Meanwhile, economic malaise morphed into anger at refugees, especially Syrians, who were perceived to receive preferential treatment. This was due, in part, to billions of euros transferred to Ankara for refugee support by increasingly xenophobic EU states who sought to prevent movement into Europe.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Some in Turkey also suspected that the top-down naturalization of select Syrians via a policy that sidestepped general citizenship criteria,Footnote ¹⁶⁶ was motivated by electoral and social engineering. Given the weak lira, many also resented the ongoing sell-off of property and other assets to wealthy investors from the Gulf seeking Muslim lite entertainments and Russians seeking respite from Putin’s war.

But if the pandemic exacerbated economic challenges, it also brought political opportunities. In illiberal political systems such as Victor Orban’s Hungary and Erdoğan’s Turkey, leaders pushed through policies that otherwise would have generated greater international consternation. One such move was the reconsecration of Hagia Sophia as a mosque in July 2020. The majestic monument had been at the center of successive “religio-scapes”Footnote ¹⁶⁷ for millennia. A church for over 900 years under the Byzantine Empire, it was a mosque from 1452 to 1934 and a museum ever since. Islamists had long called for its reconsecration as a mosque, a move AKP figures had been contemplating.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Nevertheless, actual reconversion under cover of the pandemic was a major triumph for the Islamist component of the TIS 2.0, alienating non-Muslims and many a nonpracticing Muslims in and beyond Turkey.Footnote ¹⁶⁹

Last but far from least, on February 6, 2023, just months before presumptive elections, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake and powerful aftershocks rocked southern Turkey and northern Syria. Flattening entire communities, the human and material toll was unfathomable (and simply cannot be done justice in these pages). According to international relief organizations, over 55,000 people died that evening or were trapped under rubble, as they awaited help in the days and weeks that followed.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Some 130,000 were injured. An estimated 3 million were displaced, and 16 million directly impacted.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Triggering post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for millions more who had experienced a devastating 1999 earthquake in western Turkey, citizens across the country wondered if a similar fate awaited them given the role of shoddy construction and regulation in the tragedy. Across the 11 impacted provinces, some 230,000 buildings were destroyed or damaged. The World Bank assessed the direct damage at 34.2 billion dollars.Footnote ¹⁷² The government response was widely criticized as inadequate – a state of affairs for which Erdoğan offered a rare apology. Invoking divine will, fatalism, and a call for unity, he condemned critics for “politicizing” the tragedy. Criticism nevertheless proliferated, from charges of partisan relief efforts to castigation of the entire political economy of glossy, but apparently deadly, “new Turkey.”

8.4.2 Actors and Ideas

This anguished context emboldened the opposition to pursue its two-pronged strategy: (i) mobilization of a disparate but passionate anti-government coalition via (ii) the plural, if conflicted, pluralisms of an ideational repertoire that diverse actors had innovated since the Gezi protests.Footnote ¹⁷³ The goal: to recapture the presidency as a stepping stone to reinstating parliamentary democracy.Footnote ¹⁷⁴

Toward this end, the Millet coalition formalized the participation of six parties (see Figure 8.2). Widely circulated images of conversations around the “Table of Six” defied any description of Turkey’s politics as driven by a simplistic, “secularist-Islamist” binary. Instead, the coalition brought together two pro-secular, right-leaning and one pro-secular, left-leaning party, all with Turkish nationalist credentials. Ready and willing to cooperate with three, albeit small Islamist parties, the group also was unofficially backed by the pro-Kurdish HDP. When it came to determining the unity candidate, however, there were tensions. As the primary architect of the coalition and leader of the largest party, Kılıçdaroğlu sought the role. But many, including Akşener, worried that he lacked the kairotic, cross-cutting appeal of, say, İmamoğlu.Footnote ¹⁷⁵

Figure 8.2 Opposition alliance leaders gathered in the build-up to May 2023 elections.

(Alamy)

Erdoğan too was mindful of İmamoğlu’s relatively more compelling candidacy. In keeping with the sidelining of compelling challengers such as Demirtaş (via imprisonment) and Kaftancıoğlu (via a suspended jail sentence and ban on running for parliament), İmamoğlu was slapped with a nearly three-year prison sentence for allegedly insulting the Supreme Electoral Council during the contest for Istanbul. While the decision was later postponed, pending review, it significantly elevated the risks for İmamoğlu to seek the presidency. This outcome suited Kılıçdaroğlu, who sought the candidacy for himself. The danger was that despite all the contextual factors stacking up in the opposition’s favor, he would prove no match for the seasoned – and tactically brilliant – Erdoğan, especially in a direct contest.

Kılıçdaroğlu, to be fair, was a nimble coalition-builder, but a lackluster candidate. His supporters noted, nonetheless, that being nondescript was not necessarily a drawback when campaigning against an over-the-top populist. Opinion polls suggested that significant segments of the population were so frustrated that they would simply line up beyond the “non-Erdoğan” candidate. Likely aware of his underwhelming vibe, the CHP leader had sought to position as a humble but principled Gandhi-like figure. He chose, for instance, to broadcast major messages from his modest kitchen or library. Supporters also could point to Biden’s recent, bland performance in the 2020 US presidential elections, when the US leader prevailed against more engaging fellow Democrats and the incumbent Trump. Not unlike Kılıçdaroğlu’s calculus, this was achieved by positioning as an “ordinary Joe” backed by the party’s centrists in alliance with progressives, youth, women, minorities, and the subset of republicans dismayed by Trump’s anti-pluralism.Footnote ¹⁷⁶

Ultimately, the Millet alliance went with Kılıçdaroğlu’s strategy, folding against Erdoğan’s bluff regarding İmamoğlu’s suspended sentence.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Kılıçdaroğlu’s candidacy was announced on March 6, 2023, at a symbolically loaded gathering of the six party leaders in front of Saadet headquarters. This lively start notwithstanding, Kılıçdaroğlu refrained from intensive, in-person campaigning in the buildup to the May 14th elections. Instead, and perhaps taking a page from İmamoğlu’s social media triumphs, he took several significant stands online. One garnered record attention:Footnote ¹⁷⁸ a video addressed to youth, in which Kılıçdaroğlu explicitly invoked his Alevi heritage, calling for voters to stand up for rather than repress diversity.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ In so doing, he stared down the stigma faced by politicians who foregrounded their minority identities. A poignant moment for millions, some in the opposition nevertheless, worried that this call for sectarian pluralism from an otherwise underwhelming candidate would backfire. The path to victory, after all, was via an aggregative electoral calculus. And swing votes were not located on the progressive side of the spectrum but on the right-wing, Sunni/Turkish side.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Davutoğlu, seeking to do his part on this front, released a similar video calling for pluralistic engagement as a pious Sunni.Footnote ¹⁸¹

The Cumhur coalition’s cast of characters likewise defied the “secularist-Islamist” binary. As Oran puts it, “the new Islamic conservative nationalism [wa]s a collective product” of secular and religious “Turkish right-wing ideologies and traditions.”Footnote ¹⁸² Erdoğan and lieutenants such as Soylu and Bahçeli nevertheless weaponized all available cleavages via a “very heavy nationalistic and militaristic narrative every day from morning till night on the TVs, in the newspapers [and beyond].”Footnote ¹⁸³ Framing opposition calls for political, religious, ethnic, and gender pluralism as the dangerous machinations of a motley crew, they warned that the goal was to unravel national unity.

For all the vitriol, however, the normally vivacious Erdoğan had several “off moments” when he misspoke or appeared unwell in public. These performative glitches suggested an ebbing in the leader’s kairotic energies, raising opposition hopes that the incumbent’s project was about to fold like “a pack of cards sitting on the desk of a seasoned magician.”Footnote ¹⁸⁴

8.4.3 Election Day(s)

On May 14, 2023, voters put their convictions to the test. The choice was between Erdoğan, Kılıçdaroğlu, and a third candidate, Sinan Oğan, who fronted the small, ultranationalist ATA alliance. On the Millet side, optimism was palpable. As a pithy tweet put it, leftists proceeded to vote for rightists, Kurds voted for Turkish nationalists, atheists voted for devout Muslims, homosexuals voted for extreme conservatives, and former ministers of Erdoğan voted for the staunchest opponents of his regime.Footnote ¹⁸⁵

With the ballots in, Kılıçdaroğlu carried 44.89 percent of the vote. This was highly disappointing, especially because the opposition had set expectations high by communicating probable victory in the first round. Erdoğan, for his part, secured 49.5 percent of the vote. Because this was under the 50 percent mark, a second round was scheduled between the top two candidates on May 28th. The outcome was not optimal for Erdoğan who lost ground in almost every electoral district, including many traditional strongholds. The AKP likewise underperformed, losing twenty-seven parliamentary seats. The outcome, nevertheless, was sufficient. This was because the entirety of Oğan’s 5.17 percent of the vote was unlikely to go to Kılıçdaroğlu. Erdoğan moved swiftly to co-opt the far-right upstart and his supporters, circulating, for instance, doctored materials showing the CHP leader conspiring with Kurdish militants. Erdoğan’s far-right allies also had brought fifty-five new seats to the coalition in Round One, compensating for the AKP’s contraction.

This tableau meant that in Round Two, Kılıçdaroğlu was placed in the impossible position of courting far-right nationalists while keeping the votes he had been lent by leftists, especially Kurds. He nevertheless tried. Joining forces with a prominent, anti-Erdoğan ultranationalist, Kılıçdaroğlu doubled down on anti-immigrant rhetoric and split rhetorical hairs by seeking to disassociate Kurdish voters from Kurdish terrorists. If kairos is the performative ability to seize opportunity at critical junctures, Kılıçdaroğlu’s second-round campaign was the opposite: a futile squandering of the inclusive spirit that had buoyed the opposition coalition in the first place.

In the final reckoning, Erdoğan won 52.18 percent of the vote on May 28th. The opposition carried 47.82. The outcome affirmed the purchase of the TIS 2.0 for significant portions of the electorate. Right-wing swing voters, in particular, were persuaded by fear-mongering, disinformation, and doctored images equating opposition figures with militant separatism and LGTBQ+ “depravity.” Thus, they chose first-class citizenship in a semi-authoritarian regime over ethnic or gender pluralism in a fragile democracy.

The outcome also revealed the danger of opposition echo chambers, especially in the social media spaces where Kılıçdaroğlu waged much of his campaign, rather than developing the capacity for outreach and monitoring beyond metropolitan areas. These included the earthquake zone where, despite initial criticism of the state response, the AKP expended intense efforts throughout the spring, ultimately persuading voters that it was the best bet for reconstruction.

In short then, the elections showed that even in the face of challenging circumstances, a performative-cum-strategic populist who controls significant parts of the political system from the judiciary and media to resources for economic populism, can prevail by pushing ideas that resonate across camps. By way of contrast, the opposition’s failure revealed that an innovative ideational repertoire and contextual factors that, on a more even playing field, might have favored change were insufficient absent a kairotic leader.

The upshot was an empowered executive presidency, accelerated state capture, diminishing prospects for Turkey’s diverse society to push through pluralizing change. That being said, Erdoğan – ever the coalition-breaker as well as broker – launched the new era by signaling some distance from the extreme nationalists who had handed him his crown.Footnote ¹⁸⁶