The Erdoğanization of Turkish politics and the role of the opposition

This article examines the personalization of Turkish politics during Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s third term as prime minister. While many studies focus on the prime minister’s growing personal domination of the executive branch, we consider how leaders of the opposition reflected and reinforced that trend. To test our hypotheses on this ‘Erdoğanization,’ we employed a content analysis to consider Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu and Devlet Bahçeli’s speeches at weekly parliamentary group meetings of the CHP and the MHP. Our findings reveal that, over time, both leaders increasingly referred to the prime minister in proportion to the ruling party. Between the June 2011 parliamentary elections and the August 2014 presidential elections, Kılıçdaroğlu and Bahçeli more frequently targeted Prime Minister Erdoğan with personal insults such as ‘separatist’, ‘dictator’, and ‘thief.’ Specifically, we show that during the PKK Peace Process, the Gezi Park Protests, and the Corruption Scandal, Erdoğanization reached its peak levels. The article’s conceptual framework and empirical findings have implications for the broader literature on the role of opposition in personalized settings.