Europe has been concerned for years about the rise of far-right formations. They tend to be one, two at most, with a certain force in each country. Not in Turkey: up to five parties of this type achieved good results in the elections on May 14 and may mark the future of both the second round of the presidential elections, which will be held this Sunday, May 28, and the next five years. It is the result of the fact that the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan -and also the opposition- have spent years exploiting typical discourses of the extreme right, which has ended up leading the debate to an argumentative framework favorable to these formations.
The Hüda Par (“Party of God”), heir to the fundamentalist armed group Hezbollah, has won four deputies on the lists of Erdogan’s Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP). The New Welfare Party (YRP), also an ally of the president and which came to the fore during the pandemic for its anti-vaccine protests. Now he has campaigned demanding the illegalization of LGTBI associations and the change in the laws that protect women in case of sexist violence and divorce, and he has won five seats and, in some provinces, he has surprised by receiving between 8% and 10% of the votes. And the right-wing and ultra-right parties linked to the ultranationalist Ülkücü (idealist) movement have garnered almost one in four votes in the legislative and more than 90 of the 600 seats in the chamber.
In addition, a representative of this ideology, Sinan Ogan, could tip the balance in the second round of the presidential elections after having received 5% of the ballots in the first round leading an openly xenophobic platform. In fact, in his first appearances after the vote on the 14th, the one who will be Erdogan’s rival, the center-leftist Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, has abandoned the positive campaign that characterized him until now to adopt -like the Turkish president- a polarizing rhetoric, populist and ultranationalist as a way to attract the vote of Ogan and his followers.
“It is the most conservative and nationalist parliament in history,” writes analyst Murat Yetkin. He also recalls that of the 169 seats won by the center-left Republican People’s Party (CHP), 34 will go to Islamist or Islamoliberal formations split from the AKP that had competed within their lists as part of the pact of the opposition alliance.
Turkey has always been a conservative country leaning to the right: parties of this trend have accounted for around two-thirds of the vote for decades. But, in recent years, far-right groups have begun to gain power and influence as his discourse became normalized and Erdogan was no longer able to rely solely on the support of his party to govern, given the progressive decline of him.
If in the 2014 presidential elections, Erdogan obtained 51.8% of the votes in a candidacy only supported by the AKP, in 2018 he had to ally with the Nationalist Action Party (the MHP, a nationalist extreme right) to sustain his victory : obtained 52.6% of the vote. And in this year’s elections, when in the legislative elections his party has obtained the worst results in 20 years, his presidential candidacy has not only had the support of the AKP and MHP, but he has had to add the YRP, the Huda Par and the Greater Unity Party (BBP), all of them far-right Islamist or ultra-nationalist parties. If Erdogan revalidates his presidential victory – he achieved 49.5% in the first round, compared to 44.8% of the opposition alliance -, in Parliament he will have to count on the deputies of these parties to approve the budgets, for example. And they will demand compensation.
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Concern in the feminist movement
In the feminist movement there is great concern about this. “During the AKP-MHP government, women have suffered numerous attacks. The Istanbul Convention has been canceled [contra la violencia machista], in a country where every day two women are murdered by men”, denounces Gülizar Ipek Bilek, from the Women’s Platform for Equality (ESIK). “But with these new parties an even darker future awaits us. They don’t believe in equality, they don’t want women in the public space, they want to relegate us to the kitchen. They want to turn us into an Iran or an Afghanistan,” she points out. The Hüda Par, for example, welcomed the spokesman of the Taliban government last year and its leaders refuse even to shake hands with women. The YRP also generated controversy during the campaign when, in one of its vehicles, the photograph of a candidate appeared as a simple black silhouette, unlike her fellow men.
“Turkey is locked, like other European countries and the US, in brutal culture wars and Erdogan has tried to galvanize his base with divisive rhetoric on these issues,” says Halil Yenigün, an exiled Turkish academic and now professor at the University of Turkey. Virginia (USA). But his “more reactionary” bases are still dissatisfied by the “relics of his old pro-women policies”, so while they may have voted for Erdogan in the presidential elections, they have opted for more radical parties in the legislatures. It is the same that has happened with the increasingly nationalist discourse that the Turkish leader has adopted since, in 2015, he decided to bury the Kurdish peace process and ally himself with the far-right MHP: “Erdogan has united religious and nationalist symbols to mobilize the population, has demonized dissidents, branding them as terrorists at the service of the West and has incited xenophobia”. This has allowed him to hold on to power, but at the cost of more and more votes being transferred from his party to the MHP.
Many ultranationalists, especially those with a secular tendency, are however not satisfied with this alliance with Erdogan, so the ülkücü movement has suffered various divisions. The curious thing is that these splits have not diminished support and, as if they were spores, they have germinated in new fields. The main division, the IYI Parti (Good Party), is the second force in the opposition alliance and, although it is not exactly an extremist formation —it appeals to the center-right with the inclusion of internationally renowned figures from the economic and technological sectors— it has helped to normalize ülkücü speeches. “More than votes, these formations have gained influence. Despite not being very large parties, they have had an effect on the discourse and ideology of both the government and the opposition,” explains Kemal Can, a journalist and political scientist who specializes in nationalism. Under the influence of the IYI, for example, the opposition-run Istanbul City Council named a park after Nihal Atsiz, a Nazi-influenced nationalist ideologue who, in the 1940s, was once tried and convicted of racism and for criticizing “French-type nationalism” adopted in Turkey. He was committed to a racial nationalism in which neither Jews nor blacks nor Arabs nor Kurds could fit.
The latest speeches by the center-leftist Kiliçdaroglu to attract the vote of the ultranationalists by exaggerating the situation and offering false information on immigration could have been signed by Marine Le Pen: “We will not abandon our homeland to this mentality that has brought us 10 million irregular refugees. The borders are our honor. We will not abandon our homeland to those who, without lifting a finger, watch this human tide arrive and infiltrate our veins with the hope that they will become votes. [para ellos]. Tomorrow they will not be 10, but 30 million and they will threaten our survival”.
The problem is that this far-right rhetoric is not disposable, but once used, it permeates society. “We have already seen in Europe how, when the center parties adopt the anti-immigration discourse to try to prevent the rise of neo-Nazi and far-right movements, not only do they not stop them, but they make that discourse official and that prepares the ground for these formations”, affirms Can.
Sociological studies indicate that nationalist ideas are spreading among the Turkish youth. “Erdogan has failed to create that devoted generation that he longed for. Religiosity is not growing among the youth, on the other hand, nationalism is growing through the educational system and a discourse that demonizes numerous ‘enemies’ both internal and external”, criticizes Yenigün. The academic concludes that in “Turkey the center of politics has shifted further to the right” making previously marginal positions part of the mainstream.
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