Packaging neoliberalism: neopopulism and the case of the Justice and Development Party

Abstract

Justice and Development Party’s continuous popularity among the lower classes despite its neoliberal economic policies has puzzled political analysts. This study attempts to sketch party’s strategies toward ‘packaging’ neoliberalism and rendering it acceptable to a conservative constituency. It argues that the Justice and Development Party has developed a new kind of populism departing from classical populist examples with a commitment to free market economy yet proving to be equally enthusiastic and appealing in its pro-people credentials. Convincingly inheriting the populist discourse of popular-peripheral empowerment, without confronting the raison d’etat, and staying within a patrimonialpaternalistic universe of meanings and symbols, the party merged that discourse with the “help yourself” ideology of the markets. As such, the party tried to complete Özal’s effort in revolutionizing the common sense about the market, and how public interest relates to it. The study locates the discussion in the wider context of neoliberal globalization and points to the similarities with the Latin American experience of 1990s. It analyzes the transformation of the Turkish economy under the rule of Justice and Development Party and attempts to identify winner and loser groups. Then, it invites attention to certain policy fields (education, health, anti-poverty aid and public housing) that were effectively made use of in order to court the lower classes, while at the same time contributing to the wider marketization agenda – both by keeping popular dissent at bay and with the marketized ways in which they are served. Lastly, it explores how market capitalism was constructed in the party’s discourse. It puts forward the view that contrary to what is often assumed, the party did not so much use its ideational battle on behalf of the “people” with a culturally distant “elite establishment” in an instrumental fashion to pass its economic policies unnoticed, but it tried to construct a new understanding of the economy to turn it into a very front in that battle.