Turkey’s 2015 general election: a final look at the parties and the campaign
Turkey will hold a general election on 7 June. Sezin Öney and Emre Erdoğan take a final look at the campaign before the country heads to the polls. They write that politics in Turkey has taken a notable populist turn in recent years, with the 2015 election campaign becoming dominated by a personalised style of politics, particularly in relation to the current Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and the leader of the pro-Kurdish HDP, Selahattin Demirtaş. During the campaign in 2014 for Turkey’s first popularly elected President (or ‘Head of the Republic’) we wrote a piece declaring that the real winner was not so much Recep Tayyip Erdoğan himself, who secured victory with 52 percent of the vote, but populism. Ahead of Turkey’s parliamentary elections on 7 June, it is worth taking stock of what has changed since last August. As it happens, if there has indeed been a ‘change’ it has been the further transformation of Turkey into a fully populist-based political system.
