Polls indicate Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will eke out a victory in the second-round election Sunday. This will be a remarkable political moment for Turkey and global politics. Turkey is now going through over 50% inflation, the central bank reserve has become negative, for the first time since the crisis of 2002. Despite economic malaise that is impacting every facet of general people's lives, and despite the first-round election being quite unfree and unfair, it is clear that a significant portion of Turkey's people is still backing Erdogan, the man who has been in charge of the country for more than twenty years.
If Erdogan wins the election, a lot of people around the world will regard this as an example of the success of Islamist politics, since he is widely viewed as a prime example of a leader who puts religion at the center of politics. However, that would be wrong. Erdogan is a prime example of a leader, among many in the world, who has used conservative populism for political success. It is just that among the very significant conservative population in Turkey, religion and religious identity is very important, and religion is something they want to conserve very ardently.
There is a clear difference between religious political parties and political parties that are inspired by religious values. Religious parties want to recast the state, the nation, the economy, the society, based on rules and principles found in religious texts. Conservative parties on the other hand want to give religious values a prominent place in all those arenas but keep the structures of modern nation-states unaltered. Muslim Brotherhood, Jamaat Islami, and the Iranian regime are some of the mainstream examples of religious political organizations. Erdogan leads an Islamic conservative party. One can argue that Imran Khan's politics is on a similar path. India's BJP, many Christian Democratic parties in Europe are some of the non-Muslim examples of political organizations inspired by religion.
A clear pattern has emerged in the Muslim countries in the last few years, showing that while conservative political organizations have been doing quite well, actual religious parties are in very dilapidated states. Muslim Brotherhood, the fountainhead of political Islam since the 1960s, is in the backfoot in every Middle East country. En Nahada, the Tunisian offshoot of MB and the poster child of a successful religious party until recently, has been violently shoved away from power with little backlash from home or abroad. Jamaat Islami is not gaining any more political prominence in either Pakistan or Bangladesh. In India, there have been speculations recently that BJP's hostility towards Muslims is driving them towards their own religious political parties, abandoning previous shelters like Congress or Trinamool. However, recent elections have shown that Indian Muslims support mainstream parties with increasing fervor while the much-ballyhooed Asaduddin Owaisi's All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) has drawn negligible Muslim votes repeatedly.
There are many reasons for the decline of religious parties in the Muslim world. The IS, and the Afghan Taliban have delivered massive shocks to religious politics by demonstrating the worst cases of religious organizations obtaining absolute power. The Iranian regime is not a successful advertisement of a theocratic state either. Muslim Brotherhood in its brief stint in power in Egypt made few friends and lots of enemies. En Nahada also failed to show that it has answers to Tunisia's myriad intractable economic and social problems.
Nevertheless, there is a more profound, more universal reason for the resurging of politics of conservatism while religious politics languish. Globalization, immigration, the internet, and other modern drivers have accelerated societal change everywhere. People everywhere are becoming disoriented from the fast and seemingly inexorable change. They are feeling that their local, national, religious, traditional identities and structures are dissolving away. In this time of rapid change, people who are afraid of change are gathering under leaders and organizations that promise to defend their identities from the onslaught of modernity. In other words, populist conservatism is becoming their vehicle of defense.
Take the example of sexual freedom and identities. Conservatives everywhere are banking on people's fear of the newfangled LGBTQ identities coming out of the West. Twenty years ago, issues of LGBTQ were not even remotely on the political radars of Muslim countries because almost everyone was highly conservative on this issue. Now the issue has gained prominence due to globalization and has unsettled many of the conservative majority. However, they are not flocking to religious parties. Many conservatives dislike LGBTQ issues but they dislike religious parties too. Social conservative parties and leaders have managed to tune in with people's desire for both preserving traditions and obtaining economic-technological fruits of modernization. The language of religious parties often seems too archaic by comparison.
The conservative masses in Turkey want an increased role of religion in politics to stop social changes and preserve their traditional identities but not religious politics. Erdogan is the master politician in the world in exploiting this yearning of the masses. We often hear that conservative populist leaders like Trump, Putin, Modi, Sissi, Imran Khan, highly admire the statecraft of Erdogan. And that is why despite having the world's second-worst inflation rate and a negative balance of reserve, he is likely to win Sunday.
Shafiqur Rahman is a political scientist.
