Throughout the early 2019 election process, İmamoğlu pushed the boundaries of the secularist main opposition CHP, marching to the centre via a reconciliatory populism.
In the last five years, the majority of Turkish society has embraced anti-western discourses probably at the deepest level since NATO membership in 1952.
If Turkey can hang on to the remaining threads of its democracy and the fractured political opposition can organise itself effectively, it might not bode well for the future of president Erdogan and his ruling party.
The mission that “revolutionary guards” took upon themselves in the aftermath of the putsch was to radically transform Turkey’s social, political and institutional landscape. How are they doing?
“Actually we have been calling our experience
World War III. This is a war of destruction. The state does not call it a war,
but this is the experience of those affected.”
How can we make better sense of debates about populism. Can there be a
progressive populism? Is populism really a danger for the survival of democracy
or a key to democracy’s future?
An HDP activist in Istanbul talks
about the recent elections, the Kurdish movement’s political strategies, and the
need to organize locally in the social sphere. (Interview transcribed and translated from the Turkish).
We
urgently need a constructive and open dialogue between different strands of
thought within the populism theoretical oeuvre, if we are to develop
progressive political strategies.
