Principled consistency or opportunistic shift? hegemonic articulation and political discourse in Devlet Bahçeli’s politics, 2000–2025

This article examines the political discourse of Devlet Bahçeli, leader of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), across the period 2000–2025, through the analytical lenses of Laclau’s theory of hegemonic articulation, post-foundational discourse theory, and Bourdieu’s concepts of political field, symbolic capital, and habitus. Drawing on a full-corpus review (2000–2025, approximately 300 speeches) with sustained close reading across five critical conjunctures, the article argues that the formula ‘Önce Ülkem ve Milletim, sonra Partim ve Ben’ functions as a sedimented empty signifier whose accumulated deployment history transforms it from a rhetorical formula into a genuine discursive constraint. Building on De Cleen and Stavrakakis’s populism–nationalism distinction, the article argues that Bahçeli’s discourse is analytically nationalist rather than populist in structure, and that this nationalist logic directly explains MHP’s coalition-enabling capacity, including, most recently, the 2024–2025 overtures toward the PKK and Abdullah Öcalan. In conclusion, the findings reveal that Bahçeli’s principled stance is not a contradiction but a consistent discursive structure that precisely enables and supports the building of alliances.