Liberal Populism and Capital-Owning Class in the Transformation of Labour Regime in Turkey
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Date
2020-12
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Peter Lang
Abstract
This paper concentrates on the relationship between the populist rhetoric and capital-owning class in Turkey. The trajectory of populist rhetoric in Turkey has been defined as a consequence of intricate relations between the paradigm of statism and different representations of liberalism; and has been reconstructed within the network of tensions and intersections between statism and liberalism. Populism in Turkey is claimed to involve a liberal content blended with the discourses of developmentalism and religion, which were shaped by the state control, until the 2000s. Starting with the transition to the multi-party period, liberal populism has been used as an effective rhetorical strategy in Turkish political life for the power struggles of different factions within capital-owning class for many years. In this sense, liberal populism has established the main rhetoric in the regulation of the relations between the capital-owning class and the working class until the 2000s. Each new economic arrangement has produced its own liberal populist rhetoric and used it as a propaganda tool for subsequent arrangements. The first part of this paper puts a particular focus upon the interconnections between the discourses of liberalism and the paradigm of statism which constituted the very idea of liberal populism. The paper then attempts to understand how liberal populism shapes political discourses as well as the class dynamics. Lastly, it accounts for how liberal populist rhetoric and political practices of the capital-owning class have developed in the formation process of the circumstances that have led to ruling of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey.
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Keywords
Populism, Statism, Political Economy, Turkey, Liberalism