President Erdogan’s alliance with the far right pays off

TURKEY’S right-wing nationalists have seldom had it so good. The government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has embraced their main causes, bombing Kurdish insurgents at home and abroad, promoting militarism in education and using siege mentality as foreign policy. Their supporters have reaped the rewards of an alliance with the ruling Justice and Development (AK) party. The ulkuculer, as they are colloquially known, have landed scores of jobs in the bureaucracy amid the mass purges that followed the attempted coup of 2016.

Theyhave emerged even stronger from the presidential and parliamentary elections held simultaneously on June 24th. Ulkucu voters helped propel Mr Erdogan to a solid first-round victory. Their main political group, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), won over 11% in the parliamentary contest, twice as much as most polls predicted. The ruling AK party, which ended up a few seats short of an outright majority, depends on the nationalists for support. Despite earlier speculation, Mr Erdogan, who took his oath on July 9th—flanked by democratic heavyweights such as Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and Sudan’s leader, Omar al-Bashir—did not appoint any MHP members to his cabinet. (Instead, he placed his son-in-law, the former energy minister, in charge of the economy, a move the Turkish lira greeted by losing 4% of its value against the dollar in a matter of hours before rebounding slightly.)

The ulkuculer, many of whom have connections to Turkey’s criminal underworld, have been celebrating their good fortune in style. Two days after the election the MHP’s veteran leader, Devlet Bahceli, took out a full-page advert in a number of newspapers, naming and reprimanding every pollster and journalist who criticised him in the run-up to the election. “We’ll never forget what you did,” he wrote. Another prominent ulkucu, Alaattin Cakici, a mafia boss convicted of ordering the assassination of his former wife, went slightly further, threatening one of the journalists Mr Bahceli had listed, as well as six others, with murder.

Founded in the 1960s, the MHP traces its lineage to the 19th century, when part of the Ottoman elite embraced ethnic nationalism and the union of all Turkic peoples as a remedy against the empire’s disintegration. During much of the cold war, the ulkuculer were driven by opposition to communism. (The MHP’s armed wing, known as the Grey Wolves, spent years fighting deadly street battles against leftists.) In the 1990s, the ulkuculer backed a scorched-earth offensive against the armed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), accompanied by many human-rights abuses, and opposed any expression of Kurdish identity.

In the early years of AK rule, when Turkey launched accession talks with the European Union and implemented a string of democratic reforms, they receded from view. Their courtship with political Islam, which began in the late 1970s, resumed in the 2010s after Mr Erdogan ditched his liberal allies, broke off peace talks with the PKK and went to war with the Gulen community, a powerful sect. An attempted coup in 2016, which the Gulenists spearheaded, helped consummate the relationship.

Especially today, under a new constitution that places the entire executive in Mr Erdogan’s hands, the MHP prizes its power in the bureaucracy much more than any cabinet seats, says Kemal Can, an expert on Turkey’s right. The nationalists will probably shy away from taking an active role in economic and foreign policy, says Mr Can, but they will make sure Mr Erdogan continues to tend to domestic affairs with an iron fist. Although the government ended the state of emergency this week, tough new laws will take its place. In his letter from prison, Mr Cakici boasted about the power his men wield within the police and the army. “You do not own the state,” he wrote, addressing Mr Erdogan. “The ulkuculer are the state’s foundation.”