Over the past five years, Turkey has been in a state of unceasing turmoil. It has witnessed a mass uprising at Istanbul’s Taksim Gezi Park in 2013, a local election of March 2014, a presidential election in August 2014, two general elections in June and November 2015, a failed coup attempt in July 2016, the declaration of a state of emergency in that same month, and finally, the April 16, 2017 referendum which consolidated the rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

These events signaled nothing less than a crisis of the so-called “Turkish model,” in place since Erdoğan’s tenure began in the early 2000s and once acclaimed by the Western media as a successful harmonization of moderate Islam with neoliberal policies. ¹ How this model descended into crisis, and how Erdoğan managed to consolidate power, thereby salvaging his rule for the time being, is a puzzle for not only for the Turkish left, but for progressives more generally. Only a few years ago it seemed that his particular blend of Islam and neoliberalism was on the verge of imploding. The mass protest at Gezi Park in Istanbul threatened to topple the ruling Justice and Development Party (the AKP), and with it, Erdoğan himself. It further appeared to revitalize a moribund left. However, this revitalization of the Left failed to materialize, popular forces soon lost steam, and the locus of opposition shifted from the streets to factions within the state. The threat to Erdoğan’s power came not in the form of ongoing mass politics, but from power grabs by factions of the political elite in the form of a coup attempt. This, too, failed, and in the wake of the coup attempt in the summer of 2016 Erdoğan has not only survived all challenges, but has marginalized any apparent opposition, both within the state and without.

In this paper, I present an analysis of the structure of politics under Erdoğan’s AKP. I propose that the key to the AKP’s success in remaining in power for the last sixteen years is the particular variant of the neoliberal economic policy it has followed, which atomizes the working class while also securing its partial consent through a limited welfare regime. This model, which following other analysts I refer to as “neoliberal populism,” has managed to mute interclass conflicts as Erdoğan intended. But it did so while exacerbating the conflict between interest groups within the ruling elite. Put another way, the main political dilemma of the AKP’s neoliberal populism is that, rather than eliminating political conflict, it has merely shifted its locus upward, from the workplace and neighborhoods to the upper echelons of the political class. Thus power struggles have taken the form of intra-elite conflict, most pointedly in an attempted coup — rather than class struggle. Explaining how this came about, and how Erdoğan overcame the threat to his power, is the focus of this essay.