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FROM
TÜRKIYE
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The Class Character of AKP
In Turkey's November 2002 elections, opposing social classes, workers and the new bourgeoisie voted Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi-AKP) to power. This constituency comprised of both those who lost (the workers) and those who gained (the new bourgeoisie) from the post 1980 globalization and from the "neo-liberal" restructuring of the Turkish economy. What made these different segments of the population, unite under the AKP was their common opposition to the post-1980 establishment parties. During its election campaign, by means of a double discourse, AKP managed to balance the alarmist fears of both local and international capitalists with the welfare concerns of the Turkish working class. However, the two social classes had mutually contradictory economic interests and different expectations from AKP's government and from an economic order where Islam would be a source of influence. The new bourgeoisie, represented by the Association of Independent Industrialists and Businessmen (Müstakil Sanayiciler ve Isadamlari Dernegi - MÜSIAD) had benefited from neo-liberalism. Drawing on the Koran and Sunna, MÜSIAD outlined the characteristics of the Islamic order they wanted to promote. Based on the rules that the prophet Mohammed used to guide the exchange activity in the Medina market, they have argued that the Turkish economy should be a decentralized competitive market system with minimum state intervention and regulation. The social project that the working class wanted to promote through AKP was highly different from the one that MÜSIAD envisioned. They wanted a social order where unemployment, inequality in income distribution and poverty were significantly reduced through pro-labour public policies. The anti-poverty projects designed to improve the material conditions of the poor in urban neighbourhoods by local religious organizations, and the party's reference to egalitarianism in Islam, made people assume that AKP could respond to their grievances. Hence, its constituency and the party had different understandings of what the party represented. Evidently, the AKP government has put the interests of the petty bourgeoisie and international capital and emphasized one part of its agenda, neo-liberalism. It has taken an anti-labour stance on informal labour, unemployment, privatization and taxation. The labour's demand for employment, poverty reduction, equal income distribution and better social services fell on deaf ears. The party has chosen to decrease the government budget allocated to public investment and has refrained from using macroeconomic policies to create new employment opportunities. Instead it has chosen to increase unemployment through privatization. In order to free funds to pay back the public debt, the government has chosen to impair social services by reducing the budget allocated to them, instead of raising government revenues through taxing capital incomes. By borrowing domestically and paying the interest on domestic debt by revenues raised from a regressive tax structure (which put the tax burden on the lower income groups), the government has continued the post-1980 tradition of transferring income from the poor to the rich. Therefore, AKP has chosen to not upset the financial interests of the bourgeoisie and the international financial institutions at the expense of the welfare of the working class. By doing so, it has not diverged in any way from the neo-liberal policies of the post-1980 parties, reflecting its true nature as a bourgeoisie party. The question is in the absence of a viable social democratic alternative, what will be the implications of these on the voting behaviour of the biggest part of AKP's constituency, i.e., the working class?
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