Politics of Time and Memory: Erdoğan’s Post-2010 Discourse

This article examines the temporal structuring of populist memory politics in the speeches of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan after 2010. Moving beyond scholarship that focuses primarily on which historical events are invoked, it analyzes how time itself is organized within mnemonic discourse. Drawing on and adapting the framework of temporal connectivity proposed by Khlevniuk and Noordenbos (2025), the article develops a four-part typology of the temporal relations through which past and present are linked in political discourse. Through a close reading of Erdoğan’s commemorative speeches on the coups of 1960, 1980, and 1997, it demonstrates how narratives of continuity and temporal collapse increasingly dominate post-2010 discourse, integrating chronopolitics with scholarship on populist victimhood. In this reorganization of time, past coups are framed not as closed historical episodes but as expressions of a persistent “tutelary mentality” that continues to obstruct the national will. The article argues that this temporal reorganization produces epistemically closed narratives that recast political opposition as the extension of historical enemies, allowing Erdoğan to sustain a posture of victimhood from within consolidated power and to present authoritarian consolidation as historically necessary.