Turkish Presidential Election: August 10, 2014

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You people can do better than this thread.

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Obviously Islam is incompatible with "secularism" in the Turkish sense, given that that is incompatible with all religion.

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The central issue at hand is that Turkey is now a democratic country (which has not necessarily been true in the past) and that Kemalism is not an electorally viable ideology. As long as that remains the case the AKP will continue to win, because it represents the majority of the Turkish people. This is true across the entire country, as a quick look at the electoral map will show. The AKP is not a movement of backwards hicks.

In other words, despite the sincere attempts on the part of Atatürk and Kemalists to whitewash Turkey, Turks are under no obligation to conform to whatever left/right liberal/illiberal paradigm that Westerners insist on forcing upon them. That Erdoğan is generally popular and has not always been completely on board with state control over Islam does not make him some combination of Vladimir Putin and Ayatollah Khomeini. Turkish history and politics are fascinating as they are. It does nobody any good to muddle things by focusing on what this means for secularism in Europe.

Now, if we'd actually like to discuss this election rather than bemoaning the death of laïcité in Turkey, I'd be very interested in doing that.

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Of course any historical view of Turkish politics must account for the fact that the Turkish left was killed in 1980. It's not necessarily wrong to refer to the AKP as a party of the right, if we take the right to mean the currents descended from Menderes and his movement, but the CHP and its various Kemalist relatives are certainly not of the left.

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A majority of those Turks living in Germany that are still interested in Turkish politics seem to be rather fervent AKP supporters, but I think that there is no strong correlation between the opinion on Turkish and on German party politics (except for the radical left, of course.) Many Turkish guest workers and ex-guest workers see the SPD (or the Greens) as their natural political home in Germany, while they would never vote for its Turkish sister party, the CHP.

It is an interesting tendency, that one. The most extreme case here would be all those Irish immigrants who tended to vote Labour here but supported Fianna Fail back home

That's absolutely what I was thinking - and you can add the US Democrats to that list as well. The phrase "We are the masters now" comes to mind in explaining the difference between these sympathies. Though the position of the Jews isn't comparable to the Irish, since the modern settlement of the homeland came after the diaspora, they're the only other big diaspora I can think of in a similar situation. I would guess that the same thing applies to them, though national security seems like more of a uniting factor for Jews abroad, and maybe that matters more in the Israeli party system than economics or social topics. It all comes back to the golden rule that politics isn't about policy...

What does this have to do with Turkey?