How to Lose a Country: The Seven Warning Signs of Rising Populism. Ece Temelkuran
to the big cities: a gas formed of grudges. A scent of an ending is drifting through the air. The word is spreading. Real people are moving from small towns towards the big cities to finally have the chance to be the captains of their souls. Nothing will stay unchanged, they say. A new we is emerging. A we that probably does not include you, the worried reader of this book. And I remember how that sudden exclusion once felt.
‘No, we are different. We are not a party, we’re a movement.’
It is autumn 2002, and a brand-new party called the Justice and Development Party, AKP, with a ridiculous lightbulb for an emblem, is participating in a Turkish general election for the first time. Being a political columnist, I travel around the country, stopping off in remote cities and small towns, to take the nation’s pulse before polling day. As I sit with representatives of other, conventional parties in a coffee shop in a small town in central Anatolia, three men stand outside the circle, their eyebrows raised with an air of lofty impatience, waiting for me to finish my interview. I invite them to join us at the table, but they politely refuse, as if I am sitting in the middle of an invisible swamp they don’t want to dirty themselves in. When the others eventually prepare to leave, they approach me as elegantly as macho Anatolians can. ‘You may call us a movement, the movement of the virtuous,’ the man says. ‘We are more than a party. We will change everything in this corrupt system.’ He is ostentatiously proud, and rarely grants me eye contact.
The other two men nod approvingly as their extremely composed spokesman fires off phrases like ‘dysfunctional system’, ‘new representatives of the people, not tainted by politics’, ‘a new Turkey with dignity’. Their unshakeable confidence, stemming from vague yet strongly held convictions, reminds me of the young revolutionary leftists I’ve written about for a number of years in several countries. They give off powerful, mystic vibes, stirring the atmosphere in the coffee shop of this desperate small town. They are like visiting disciples from a higher moral plane, their chins raised like young Red Guards in Maoist propaganda posters. When the other small-town politicians mock their insistence on the distinction between their ‘movement’ and other parties, the three men appear to gain in stature from the condescending remarks, like members of a religious cult who embrace humiliation to tighten the bonds of their inner circle.
Their spokesman taps his fist gently, but sternly, on the table to finish his speech: ‘We are the people of Turkey. And when I say people, I mean real people.’
This is the first time I hear the term ‘real people’ used in this sense. The other politicians, from both left and right, are annoyed by the phrase, and protest mockingly: ‘What’s that supposed to mean? We’re the real people of Turkey too.’ But it’s too late; the three men delight in being the original owners of the claim. It is theirs now.
After seeing the same scene repeat itself with little variation in several other towns, I write in my column: ‘They will win.’ I am teased by my colleagues, but in November 2002 the silly lightbulb party of the three men in the coffee shop becomes the new government of Turkey. The movement that gathered power in small towns all over the country has now ruled Turkey uninterrupted for seventeen years, changing everything, just as they promised.
‘We have the same thing here. Exactly the same thing! But who are these real people?’
It’s now May 2017, and I am first in London, then Warsaw, talking about Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy, telling different audiences the story of how real people took over my country politically and socially, strangling all the others who they deemed unreal. People nod with concern, and every question-and-answer session starts with the same question: ‘Where the hell did these real people come from?’
They recognise the lexicon, because the politicised and mobilised provincial grudge has announced its grand entrance onto the global stage with essentially the same statement in several countries: ‘This is a movement, a new movement of real people beyond and above all political factions.’ And now many want to know who these real people are, and why this movement has invaded the high table of politics. They speak of it as of a natural disaster, predictable only after it unexpectedly takes place. I am reminded of those who, each summer, are surprised by the heatwave in Scandinavia, and only then recall the climate-change news they read the previous winter. I tell them this ‘new’ phenomenon has been with us, boiling away, for quite some time.
In July 2017, a massive iceberg broke off from Antarctica. For several days the news channels showed the snow-white monster floating idly along. It was the majestic flagship of our age, whispering from screens around the world in creaking ice language: ‘This is the final phase of the age of disintegration. Everything that stands firm will break off, everything will fall to pieces.’ It wasn’t a spectre but a solid monster telling the story of our times: that from the largest to the smallest entity on planet earth, nothing will remain as we knew it. The United Nations, that huge, impotent body created to foster global peace, is crumbling, while the smallest unit, the soul, is decomposing as it has never been before. A single second can be divided up into centuries during which the wealthy few prepare uncontaminated living spaces in which to live longer while tens of thousands of children in Yemen die of cholera, a pre-twentieth-century disease. The iceberg was silently screaming, The centre cannot hold.
The progressive movements that sprang up all around the world, from the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999 to the 2011 uprising in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, were in many respects a response to these fractured times. In a world where more people are talking, but fewer are being heard, they wanted to tell the rest of humanity, through their bodies, that regardless of our differences we can, and indeed must, come together to find collective answers to our age of disintegration, otherwise everything will fall apart. They demanded justice and dignity. They demanded that the world realise that a counter-movement is necessary to reverse the global course of events. They showed us that retreat is not the only response to the global loss of hope. They were the ones who resisted the temptation to ‘yield to the process of mere disintegration’, and rejected the notion that it is ‘a historical necessity’.* Their answer to disintegration was to create new, invigorating, temporary and miniature models of loose collectives in squares around the world. In several different languages they responded to the famous words of W.B. Yeats with the message that, if people unite, the centre can hold.
As time passed, however, many of these progressive movements ended up suppressed, marginalised or swallowed back into the conventional political system. For several understandable reasons they couldn’t accomplish what they started – not yet. However, their voice was clearly heard when they announced globally that representative democracy (abused by financial institutions and stripped of social justice) was undergoing its biggest crisis since the Second World War.
Today we are witnessing the response to similar fears of an entirely different mass of people, one with a more limited vocabulary, smaller dreams for the world, and less faith in the collective survival of humanity. They too say that they want to change the status quo, but they want to do it to build a world in which they are among the lucky few who survive under the leadership of a strong man. It is no coincidence that ‘wall’, whether literal or virtual, has become the watchword among rising right-wing political movements. ‘Yes, the world is disintegrating,’ they say, ‘and we, the real people, want to make sure we’re on the sunny side of the dividing wall.’ It is not that they want to stand by and watch babies die in the Mediterranean, it is just that they don’t want to die as well. What we are hearing, as it carries from the provinces to the big cities, is the survival cry of those whose fear of drowning in the rising sea of disintegration trumps their interest in the survival of others. And so, ruthlessly, they move.
Political movements are promises of transition from actuality to potentiality – unlike political parties, which must operate as part of actuality, playing the game but standing still. This is why, from Turkey to the United States, including the most developed countries with their seemingly strong democratic institutions, such as France, the UK and Germany, we have seen people assemble