The Social Democratic Populist Party: Revisiting the Recent Past of Social Democracy in Turkey

Abstract

This study aims to examine the case of the Social Democratic Populist Party (Sosyaldemokrat Halkçı Parti – SHP) that functioned as the major representative of the social democratic ideology in Turkey under highly extraordinary conditions of the post-1980 coup political atmosphere until 1995. Realizing the necessity of taking this critically important phase in the evolution of Turkish social democratic thought into account, the major argument of this paper is that even if the SHP spent a remarkable amount of effort for achieving its ultimate target of evolving into a European-style, ‘genuine’ social democratic party, it ultimately failed to reach this end due to three interrelated factors, such as changing political realities in the domestic and European contexts during the 1980s, the intra-party turmoil within the SHP, and the poor performance of the SHP in power. In relation to this core argument, the ideological decline of the SHP is claimed to have a direct impact on the successive electoral defeats and ideological drifts of the CHP, as its successor, in the following years.