Demirtas with his family. During the campaign for Turkey’s first popularly elected ‘Head of the Republic’, we wrote a piece declaring the winner to be “populism”. Turkey will have parliamentary elections tomorrow on June 7 and here is an update on what has changed under this heading since last August.
We would argue that if a change is under way, it is Turkey’s transformation into a fully-fledged populist political system.
Though there is no consensus on the definition of populism, a widely accepted one is proposed by Cas Mudde “as an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogenous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté general of the people”.
