The Rise of the Right-Wing Good Party (İYİP) in Turkey: Authoritarian Turn, Anomie, and Regulatory Nostalgia

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the rise of a newly established nationalist right-wing political party in Turkey—namely the Good Party (İYİP)—with respect to the concept of anomie. In contrast to the mainstream literature, which exclusively concentrates on the concept of populism in its analysis of the rise of right-wing political parties, this study explains the İYİP’s advancement using Institutional Anomie Theory, along with the fall of the ‘Turkish Dream’, wherein the democratic and economic aspirations of the 2000s were hindered in the 2010s by the authoritarian turn and the entrenchment of the neoliberal economic order. In other words, a contradiction between historically embedded goals (democratization and wealth) and the political means exercised (authoritarian turn and neoliberalism) led to anomie in Turkey, which created a window of opportunity to be exploited by a right-wing political party. The article concludes, based on İYİP rhetoric, that the backlash against the authoritarian turn may surface in the form of regulatory nostalgia for the parliamentary system and exclusionary attitudes towards Syrians living in Turkey.