Introduction

This chapter looks at how the newspapers that position themselves as politically close to the government portrayed and presented the health sector agenda of the government. The chapter is based on a scan of two major pro-government newspapers of the period, Zaman and Yeni Şafak, between 2002 and 2011.

These two dailies were scanned for news articles and columns on health policy changes in particular and the Turkish health sector in general. The aim of this chapter is to show how the pro-government media portrayal of the health sector complemented a broader discursive narrative of the government on health. This portrayal positions the government determined to end victimisations caused by the pre-AKP (Justice and Development Party) era healthcare system, presents changes introduced to the healthcare system by the AKP as unprecedented developments and depicts opponents of the reform – namely doctors – as driven by self-interest.

In the AKP's populist discourse, serving the people, treating all citizens as equal, being just, representing a radically different approach from previous governments and the claiming to introduce a total change of mentality in the country emerge as central themes. This populist politics rests on a discursive opposition constructed between the ‘Old Turkey’, where the AKP claims the citizens were victimised by the elites, and the ‘New Turkey’ that the AKP offers to construct on the basis of equality.

Day-to-day issues such as health and transformation are areas through which the populist politics are constructed as the short-term consequences of those issues are compatible with the short-term result-oriented agenda of populist politics. This study will look at how the populist politics of AKP is constructed through health reform. In this broader political picture, healthcare emerged as a key discursive space where the AKP's populist claims to end ‘Old Turkey’s’ social inequalities and ‘victimisations’ materialised. Furthermore, the AKP's changes to the healthcare system were presented as steps that symbolised the creation of a ‘New Turkey’ where previously victimised people are saved from privileged elites.

In other words, it was not only structural changes that the AKP insistently aimed to introduce into the health system through the Health Transformation Programme (HTP) but also a strong discursive determinacy to propagate these changes as the end of the inequalities of ‘Old Turkey’ that created a rupture in Turkey's larger political field.