La Turquie: du "populisme permanent" a la montee de l'extreme-droite
In: Politique et sociétés, Band 21, Heft 2, S. 123-135
ISSN: 1203-9438
In this article, we examine the Turkish case for populism that was applied since the establishment of the multiparty regime on 1950. The originality of the Turkish case resides in two facts. (1) Populist policies were implemented by conservative center-Right governments rather than by Left governments as in some Latin American countries. Based on patron-client relations as a dominant characteristic of the rural social structure, these parties organized themselves as patronage networks. These party organizations can be characterized as machine-parties rather than as parties with coherent ideologies & national programs. Thus, they distributed to their clients the resources obtained more or less easily from foreign suppliers during the Cold War, due to Turkey's geostrategic importance as a NATO member. (2) It entails a vicious circle provoked by these populist policies manifest in a cycle of populist policies/crisis/military intervention/austerity measures. However, with the end of the Cold War period & the beginning of the globalization era, it became harder for Turkish governments to obtain long-term foreign debt in terms of multilateral agreements to carry out their populist policies. As a result, these resources were replaced by short-term, high-cost capital inflows. These inflows paradoxically facilitated the implementation of populist policies &, at the same time, worsened already severe consequences. As a result, sociopolitical tensions created by these severe conditions triggered the rise of radical movements such as political Islam & ultranationalism. Adapted from the source document.