Soner CagaptayVerified account

Cool graphic but I’m not sure it’s fair to say CHP is leftist or even that the reason it won where it did had anything to do with leftist policy proposals.

I call CHP centre conservative..

No. The base is kemalist the party leadership is new-left, liberal.

If there is one thing I’ve learned in many years studying political ideology in Turkey it’s that unless you are talking extremes (TKP, VP, etc in this instance) speaking of parties on left-right spectrums is a fool’s errand.

I would say the CHP is leftist in the Turkish context, just as the AKP can be considered political Islamist along same spectrum. In another country, not only the AKP but the CHP, too, could be viewed as centrist etc., but Turkish context should matter to describe party identity

I understand why you say that but I think in an environment where HDP and TKP are winning elections I don’t know how much utility that descriptor really affords us. I think it’s more helpful to define the parties in the middle as varieties of corporatism.

Because at the end of the day, Kemalism and AKP style political Islam boil down to cementing the dominance of a particular type of subject over another that doesn’t necessarily cut cleanly along class lines.

That’s a great point! Since 1990s, CHP has basically morphed into a middle/upper middle class party (plus poor -and I don’t just mean oppressed - Alevis) versus the AKP that has emerged as the party of the working and lower middle classes (also including outlier constituencies)

But can't get away from the fact that the vast sprawl of interior Anatolia is still strongly AKP. The basic pattern has always been CHP in cities/periphery - &, let's face it, the #Istanbul vote was still very close.