I have long wanted to write an article about the brave new Turkey which is so drastically opposed to what AKP tried to create over its 20 years of social engineering experts, that it would shock all those foreign and resident experts.
I couldn’t because the evidence for a new Turkey, urban, tolerant and pro-Western is hidden under dozens of social attitude surveys, which exceed my meagre intellectual capacity. The job was done excellent by Evangelos Areteos of University of Nicosia in an analysis titled: “Attempting to Map the Turkish Electorate AKP’s Challenge of Religious Voters’ Disaffection”.
This article is largely a collection of excerpts from his paper filled in with my commentary to put the findings in a broader context.
I read each day at least half a dozen Turkish and English language commentaries about how Turkey has been turned into a Moslem nation, how it turned her back to Ataturk’s pro-Western idealism and finally how unshakeable Erdogan’s iron grip is on the sociology of Turkish nation. None of these observations are true. Erdogan and AKP have been bypassed by a younger generation and their now well-to-do elders who have swapped their ideology for the trappings of a comfortable, peaceful urban life. They have become bourgeois, while Erdogan remains the Last Shining Knight of Political Islam.
President Erdogan wants to go to the Moon, people want supper
The author start by asking the question whether AKP’s frequent efforts to appeal to the Islamic ideals can cover up the economic and diplomatic mess the country is in. His answer is
“However, deep social changes in the Turkish society, including amongst the conservatives, seem to be a major challenge for the success of such a mobilization. The current dissatisfaction of the conservative/Islamist voters and their distancing from AKP is undoubtedly sparked by the negative economic circumstances. However, deeper structural challenges also have a role to play”.
I used to believe only a few months ago that the massive drop of Erdogan and his Islamist/nationalist AKP-MHP coalition was solely attributable to increasing impoverishment of their core constituencies. Apparently, the dissatisfaction has deeper causes, which better economic management may not heal.
“According to Bekir Agirdir, head of KONDA research, those who define their lifestyle as “modern” increased from 27,3% in 2012 to 37,2% today. “Traditional conservatives” were 45,9% in 2012, and 41,6% today, while the “religious conservatives” percentage decreased from 26,8% to 21,2% today.”
What do Turks think? Listening to opinion polls
It is worth remembering that just like I won’t admit to be an alcoholic if asked in an opinion poll, a large number of Turks who disavowed Islam in their daily lives, would not say so. Despite this simple sociological datum, look at the numbers who declare themselves Deist or Atheist:
“Those who defined themselves as “atheists” were just 0,7% in 2008, but 4% in 2021. “Unbelievers” increased too, from 1,4% in 2008 to 4,1% in 2021.
“Believers”, in the same period, increased from 30,3% to 35,5%, while “Religious people” decreased from 54,2% to 46,6%, and “pious people” decreased from 12,4% to 10,3%.
These findings identify a secularization trend; a trend of distancing from religion and traditional religiosity by actually adopting secularized social and anthropological behaviors, revealing the deep transformations that shake Turkish
society and that go against the efforts and the aspirations of the government.
These trends are confirmed from the “Turkey Trends – 2021” survey conducted by Kadir Has University : those who defined their political view as political Islamists (and until 2019 as “religious”) decreased from 21% in 2016 to 9% in 2021 while those who defined themselves as “conservatives” increased from 22,6% in 2016 to 27,5% in 2021. “Conservative” here implies that Islam is not the first political identity. This is confirmed by the fact that the second closest political view is “political Islamist” for 30,5%”.
Here is another testament to my remark that dissatisfaction with Erdogan and his heavy-handed social engineering tactics runs too deep to be reversed with better economic performance.
“Max Hoffman from the Center for American Progress argues:
“The working- and middle-class religious conservative and cultural traditionalists who have long been the core of the AKP are still a plurality, but among the younger cohorts they do not seem to enforce norms among the group the way core AKP supporters tend to do in groups comprised of older voters. There is a great deal more heterodoxy among young conservatives”.
Furthermore, young conservatives seem to distance themselves from AKP. This trend was recorded in a KONDA survey on AKP voters showing that, while in 2010 36% of AKP voters were young people between the ages of 18 and 32, in 2017 the number decreased to 28%.
AKP voters, and especially the younger generations, are caught in the middle of a great dynamic of urbanization: in 2010, 28% of AKP voters came from the countryside, 29% from towns and 42% from metropolitan cities, while in 2017 20% came from the countryside, 35% from towns and 45% from metropolitan cities.
One of the bigger shckers for secularist Turkish eltie ougth to be the revelation that wide-scale Islamization of secondary education bore no fruit, non, zero!
“The efforts of the government to create a “pious generation”, mainly through religious schooling (imam hatip), that would live according to the traditional religious precepts and values seems to have reached its limits. According to Murat Gezici of Gezici Araştırma Merkezi, the population rate of the Z generation (those born after 1999) will be around 12%, and about 80% of this generation will not vote for the AKP.
Consequently, the societal transformation is testing the limits of Islamist mobilization and instrumentalization of Islam. For example, there is an increase of women who do not cover their heads, from 68,8% in 2020 to 70,5% in 202111.
The number of those who think that the polarization in Turkey is between seculars and religious fell from 43,5% in 2019 to 39,4% in 2021. Amongst AKP voters, this number fell from 41,9% in 2019 to 37,9%12 in 2021, showing the limits of the narrative that tries to highlight the opposite.
Finally the “money shot”: Can Erdogan turn the clock back?
TEAM argues that a rapid deterioration in the economy may lead the hesitant part of the religious voters to quickly turn away from Erdogan and the People’s Alliance and lead to a change in power. On the other hand, if Erdogan and the People’s Alliance can change the course of the economy in the last period before the 2023 elections and remove the image of incompetent management, the possibility of religious voters to contribute to the change of power in 2023 may be considerably reduced.
However, despite the fact that economic conditions seem to be the most decisive factor regarding the conservative voters’ distancing from AKP and Erdogan, it seems that under the surface lies a deeper disaffection that Islamism and its instrumentalization are not sufficient anymore to reverse.
Damon H Grande
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