The Political Consequences of Anti-Populism: Revisiting the Populism Debates in Türkiye (1980s–1990s)

Abstract

This article revisits debates on populism among Turkish leftist and Marxist intellectuals during the 1980s and 1990s. While contemporary scholarship largely treats populism as a political style, discursive strategy, or new regime type, these earlier debates analysed it through the relationship between development strategies and distributional conflict. Focusing on Korkut Boratav’s interpretation and the discussions it generated, the article examines populism as a political-economic configuration linked to import-substitution industrialization (ISI) and as a mode of incorporating the popular sector into the political system, situating the Turkish debate within Latin American theories of populism and dependent development. It argues that these neglected debates offer conceptual tools for understanding the relationship between populism, class politics, democracy, and neoliberal restructuring.