The political ideology of Turkey’s Islamist swing under Erdoğan

Abstract

ABSTRACT After running Turkey with a neoliberal reformist agenda in the 2000s, Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) made a Turco-Islamist turn in the early 2010s. Defining the turn as restitutive Islamism, this paper explains it by Erdoğan’s ethno-religious ideas and political strategies. More specifically, the paper argues that his dormant Turco-Islamist ideas, shaped in the first wave of Islamicization in the 1970s and 1980s, were reactivated by two – one internal and one external – triggers in the late 2000s: (1) escalation of mass protests and military-juridical scheming by the conservative-laicist bloc against the AKP rule; and (2) failure of the European Union to meaningfully engage in accession negotiations with Turkey. Putting to use his effective communication skills, keen sense of domestic and international juncture, and knack for building and breaking alliances, Erdoğan also relied on the institutional legacy of Kemalism for advancing the cause of Turco-Islamism.