Notebook #4

Voters turning away from the CHP, the new educational curriculum, extreme negativity, the sword oath, Turkish Capitalism

Hi folks,

This is a semi-weekly bundle of things relating to my media consumption.

The first item is free, the rest if for paid subscribers only.

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One quick thing: as I mentioned in previous posts, I’ve joined the board of Toplum Araştırmaları Enstitüsü (TAE) in an advisory role.

As part of that effort, my friend and longtime colleague Hüseyin Raşit Yılmaz and I are doing a Turkish-language podcast series on the elections in the United States.

It’s very much in the style of Kültürkampf, in the sense that we’re really interested in the history, culture and political ideas behind the new items.

So for Turkish speakers, here’s the Spotify link:

If you absolutely feel like you want to see me talk, here’s also a YouTube link.

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Voters are turning away from the CHP

The CHP did very well in the regional elections this year. Most of the time when something like that happens, people prognosticate that the opposition’s decades-long losing streak is over, and that they’ll win in the next elections.

Something like that might one day happen, but in March 2024, I didn’t think it was. I thought that Erdoğan was going through a rough patch, and that a sliver of his voters wanted to punish him, but that they’d be back at some point.

Well, that some point seems to be approaching.

I don’t spend much time reading or thinking about polls, but Burak Bilgehan Özpek, who works with Metropoll does, and he’s reporting they have a special monthly analysis that they sell to foreign embassies, financial institutions, etc. and it is indicating that the CHP is no longer the most popular party in Turkey, that the small parties, including New Welfare, are shrinking, and that voters are returning to the AK Party.

All this is happening despite the country being in one of the most painful phases of its economic recovery plan.

Surprise: people don’t seem to think that the CHP/united opposition could have performed better economically. I agree. They probably couldn’t have. This is a point Ümit Akçay has been making. The opposition thought that they could re-heat economic orthodoxy and serve it up to people, and they’d lap it up. That’s not what happened. Voters understood that there was no significant difference between the ways the government and the opposition approached the economy, so they went with the thing they knew.