Gozde Yilmaz*
Necati Özkan, the campaign director for Ekrem İmamoğlu, attributes İmamoğlu’s victory in the 2024 local elections and the general success of the CHP in these elections to “politics-free politics” and “project politics.” Özkan had written that İmamoğlu started his “heroic journey” back in 2014 with the slogan “If there’s İmamoğlu, there’s a solution!” by highlighting his managerial identity and projects, without engaging in politics or triggering any ideological connotations. Politics-free politics is not merely a synonym for “apoliticism”; it’s a deliberate stance adopted by the “renewed” CHP to become the leading party nationwide, leaving behind the “nationalist league.” Özgür Özel’s advice to mayors to “stay away from general politics” is also interpretable from the perspective of politics-free politics.
Politics-free politics is a concept politicians and administrators often aspire to embody to capture the neoliberal spirit of the age, yet they frequently fail to achieve the right balance. The character of the 2002 general elections that brought the AK Party to power, as Raşit Kaya once wrote, was defined by the inability to develop a hegemonic project that could unite broad segments of society due to conflicting internal dynamics, leading to a politics built on denigrating politics itself and keeping economic decisions out of political interference. This “confusion” has continued to date, as Tanıl Bora pointed out, representing a problem of politics failing to become politicized. A “brand new” CHP attempts to overcome this situation with a paradigm shift.
Without exceeding constitutional determinations and accepting them as given, politics-free politics can be defined as maintaining social tension through certain political actions, glorifying democracy, pluralism, freedom, and equality in political rhetoric while suppressing and even banning deliberative democracy, sufficiently isolating, neutralizing, and psychologically preparing the culture-individual for the hegemony of neoliberal economic policies. Politics-free politics corresponds to post-politics. Slavoj Zizek discusses how post-political politics does not simply try to suppress politicization but categorically bans it. In this realm, the ideological struggles between various parties competing for power give way to collaborations among intellectuals and technocrats (economists, public opinion experts, etc.), where a consensus is reached through negotiations over interests, emphasizing the need to confront new and different issues beyond old ideological divisions.
Because this is what the spirit of our neoliberal era demands. As Oliver Roy wrote, only in a depoliticized society, where everyone lives as if they belong to a threatened minority needing to defend their rights and protected spaces and where the infinite division of identities shatters any solidarity large enough to make a difference, can post-politics exist. In post-politics, the insertion of a “divisive” political party or ideology between the “market-person” stripped of collective memory and the “manager-leader” stripped of the party ideal is unwelcome. In post-politics, power does not get integrated into the telos of a group; instead, “political power is approximated to the force of secularized activities of working, exchanging, and enjoying, aimed at a political practice synchronized with the rhythms of the world, the flow of things, and the circulation of energies, desires, and information.”
Let’s focus on our business
In the post-politics of “Let’s focus on our business,” the prevailing view is that the manager-leader has already fulfilled whatever is “necessary” for market-people. The intellect that thinks, decides, and “projects” on behalf of market-people also undertakes the multicultural policing of post-politics. With the banning of areas of disagreement where the excluded and identity-less can protest injustices done to them as “unnecessary,” a new form of racism emerges gleamingly. Zizek writes that post-modern racism manifests as a result of the suspension of the political in the post-political age and the transformation of the state into a police force serving the needs of the market operation and tolerant humanism supporting multiculturalism.
This transformation leaves behind the “unofficial foreigner” as the indivisible remainder. Zizek also draws attention to the covert solidarity between the two opposing faces of post-political liberal tolerance; on one hand, real politics is replaced by “humanitarian” operations purged of politics (such as humanitarian protections for human and citizenship rights), and on the other hand, we witness the rise of “extreme” ethnic or religious fundamentalist violence as a manifestation of depoliticization. For instance, trustees are condemned in the context of human rights for their “left, social democratic” identity, yet support is also given to a mayor who declares that members of the DEM Party will not be allowed to enter the municipal building during his tenure. The “covert solidarity between the two opposing faces” in post-political politics is an effort to maintain social dynamics in balance. It would be more appropriate to approach the issue from the perspective of mandatory balance adjustments rather than looking at the different faces of liberal tolerance. To avoid this necessity, warnings are issued for leaders not to interfere in general politics.
In politics-free politics, those behind the veil of unknowing are the “market-people” of post-democracy, where political activities only occur at the ballot box. The shadow of the veil of unknowing extends not only to the public sphere but also to the private sphere referred to as a politics-free area. The “inclusive” manager-leader, for instance, might say he feels the sorrow of an elderly Kurdish woman crying on his shoulder due to her poor economic condition, even if he doesn’t understand what she’s saying, and dismisses the epistemological incomprehensibility by “feeling” it, trapping the other in this incomprehensibility in daily life. In post-politics, market-people may have some “colorful” demands. For example, if Kurds want to learn and develop the Kurdish language, the manager-leader certainly opens courses in “appropriate places.” However, the significance of these language courses in post-politics is not equivalent to activities such as distributing mother-cards, opening city restaurants, metros, and kindergartens. Since they have no economic indicator and the people requesting them are constitutionally Turks, these courses are merely considered “normal” hobbies.
The manager-leader does not have the need or time to deal with observations such as “there is a clear perception, mood, and emotional contrast between Kurds and Turks in the face of events and situations” in post-political politics. In post-politics, individuals are outside the political and are merely terminus ad quem-terminus a quo. In post-politics, pluralistic recognition demands are strictly separated from political decisions regarding the redistribution of wealth. It should also be mentioned that there is no place for the post-Kemalist paradigm that opens Kemalism to discussion in politics-free politics. İlker Aytürk talked about the political, economic, and socio-cultural conditions that created post-Kemalism disappearing day by day, the staggering post-Kemalist movement due to the cut-off lifeline, and the increasing ridiculousness of blaming every problem on Kemalism, indicating the need for a new approach whose form is unpredictable. It is possible to mention that post-political politics in the renewed CHP will render post-Kemalism dysfunctional. Instead of the expected post-post Kemalism, post-politics that has “transcended” deliberative democracy makes its appearance on the stage.
Thus, can it be said that the renewed CHP is an opposition party in Turkey?
- Gözde Yılmaz is an associate professor at the Atılım University in Turkey. She completed her PhD at Berlin Graduate School for Transnational Studies (BTS) at the Free University Berlin. She has a BA in International Relations from Hacettepe University and a MA in International Studies (European Integration) from the University of Birmingham. She has publications on the Europeanization of Turkey, EU-Turkey relations, China-Turkey relations, minority rights and non-discrimination in the EU and Turkey. Her research interests are norm diffusion, European Union, external Europeanization, EU-Turkey Relations, minority rights and non-discrimination in the EU and Turkey and most recently, authoritarian diffusion and China-Turkey relations.
- This article was originally published in Turkish in Birikim Magazine and translated into English by Politurco.
[1] Özkan, N. 2019. Kahramanın Yolculuğu: Yeni Nesil Siyasetin Zaferi, MediaCat, p. 72.
[2] Kaya, A. R. 2002. “On the Non-Political Elections”, Yeni Devlet Yeni Siyaset – Doğu Batı, Issue: 21.
[3] Dean, J. 2009. ‘’Politics without Politics’’, Parallax, 15(3).
[4] Zizek, S. 2003. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, trans. Şamil Can, Metis Publications, p. 240.
[5] Ibid., p. 241.
[6] Roy, O. 2024. The Flattening of the World: The Domination of Culture and Norms, Metis Publications, p. 159.
[7] Ranciere, J. 2007. On the Shores of Politics, trans. Aziz Ufuk Kılıç, Metis Publications, p. 19.
[8] Zizek, S. 2019. “Carl Schmitt in the Age of Post Politics”, The Challenge of Carl Schmitt (Edited by: Chantal Mouffe), trans. Hivren Demir Atay and Hakan Atay, İletişim Publications, p. 49.
[9] Ibid., p. 50.
[10] Bülbül, İ. 2024. “Two Speculations on the Mood of the Kurds”, Society and Science, issue:167.
[11] Mouffe, C. 1993. Return of the Political, Verso Books, p. 56.
[12] Aytürk, İ. & Esen, B. (eds.) 2022. Post-post Kemalism: New Searches in Turkey Studies, İletişim Publications, p. 37.
