Building Solidarity through Standing Up for Truth
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- Published on Tuesday, 21 March 2017 23:45
- Written by editor
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1386 .... March 22, 2017
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Building Solidarity through Standing Up for Truth
Academics for Peace in Turkey
Çağlar Dölek and Gülden Özcan
The fate of the neoliberal Islamist project of authoritarian restoration in Turkey will be determined by an upcoming referendum on April 16 of this year. The referendum will be held under the conditions of a state of emergency in effect since the July 15 coup attempt last year. The regime's use of the putsch attempt to suppress all forms of dissent has quickly evolved into an overriding choice to make the state of emergency the permanent form of governance in Turkey. In this sense, the April 16 plebiscite on constitutional changes marks a defining stage in the politics of violent polarization and oppression under way for more than... a decade whereby President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his cronies have increasingly paralyzed the social and political fabric of the country in their relentless pursuit of the project of a one-man rule.
The question on the ballot is nothing less than a version of Führerprinzip, dubbed the “presidential system” in the managed and heavily censored mass media discourse in Turkey. A permanent Erdoğan presidency is offered as a panacea to the ruling classes to resolve the constitutional and economic gridlock of the neoliberal regime. However, as various polls are now signaling, the swaying of the public opinion toward #NO, the government is increasing the volume of suppression and making moves for a total closure of public deliberation about the real content of the regime change on the ballot. What is more (as vividly experienced in the recent crisis over the politics of the far right in Germany and the Netherlands), the ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) seems to be panicking about an upset in the referendum, and resorting once again to a vulgar politics of Turkish victimhood, this time vis-à-vis Europe.
The unfolding dynamics of political power and Erdoğan's claim to majoritarian rule makes the freefall and panic of the regime all the more apparent. While there is a populist push to establish one-man rule through a politics of political oppression from above and mob rule from below, the widening mobilization of a spectrum of opposition groups is forcing the regime to govern through statutory decrees which bypass constitutional and parliamentary checks and balances altogether. This is a systematic, if not novel, resort to measures that attempt to cage the socio-political fabric of Turkish society into a pro-capital, repressive and radical conservative settlement. The mass dismissals from different branches of the public sector are not only directed against the alleged coup plotters, they are also used as the key means of purging progressive, left-wing, and secular cadres from the public institutions. The case of Academics for Peace is one of the most notable examples demonstrating the political motives of the purges and the ideological content of the restoration project being pursued by the AKP.