Requiem for a Dream: Rise and Fall of the Turkish Middle Classes

In the aftermath of the 2001 economic crisis, Ayşe Buğra writes, “I think that Turkish society welcomed the February 2001 crisis very softly.” Many people in Turkey lost their jobs, and even when they kept them, they lost a significant percentage of their earnings because of the unprecedented depreciation of the Turkish Lira. Yet they did not stockpile provisions as they did before the first snowfall every winter, nor did they storm the banks or exchange offices in panic. They waited in an astonishing silence.

The Justice and Development Party (AKP) was founded in August 2001, just six months after the February 2001 economic crisis, and came to power alone in the general elections of 3 November 2002. The people, who met the 2001 economic crisis with great silence, took their revenge from the established parties at the ballot box.

Dozens of things have been written in the last 20 years of Turkey under the rule of the AKP. Yet the most astonishing and under-current development in Turkey is the rise and fall of the middle classes.

Middle Class, One More!

Turkey partially owes its democratizing potential to the urban middle classes. Ever since the establishment of the Turkish republic, they were also the carriers of Turkish modernization. They were teachers, lawyers, doctors. Educated in western-style quality institutions, they aspired to live in a modern, democratic country. Their numbers accelerated in the 1970s as their desires to catch up with the West. The 1980 coup interrupted these desires once more.

The military coup of 1980 was short-lived. In the 1983 elections, the Turkish electorate opted for a brand-new party with no institutional history engrained in Turkish party politics. The newly elected prime minister Turgut Özal made the idea of middle-class rule (he even coined a new term of middle classes, ortadirek –middlepillar) the core of his political strategy. In the decade followed, the middle classes flourished. They were no longer just urban, professional groups. They were contractors, craftsmen, and shopkeepers.

A Different Middle Class, Different Aspirations

These new middle classes were radically different from the status middle classes of the old era. While status middle classes owed their well-being to a functioning welfare state, these groups owed their well-being to economic liberalization and growth. They established family businesses, employed on average several dozens of workers, and established close links with their employers.

Their Muslim identities helped them to build a close “familial” relationship with their employers. Their educational backgrounds, their life paths were different from status middle classes, as their aspirations. The idea of ever-expanding markets was important for them. They cherished economic stability, may be more than democratic legitimacy.

These groups have become the most critical partner of the AKP and the key factor behind decades of its electoral success.

Global Middle Classes

This expanding middle-class phenomenon is not unique to Turkey. According to Branko Milanovic, two groups are the winner of the economic globalization of the four decades. The first group is the world’s richest 1 percent, whose real incomes rose sharply during this period. Many of these people have resided in already wealthy Western countries.

The second group of winners is those in the middle-income strata, and most of them are citizens of the developing countries such as China, India, and Turkey. This uneven and combined development will lead to the disappearance of the middle class in the West, but the emergence of a new middle class in developing countries. For the first time in history, The Economist writes in 2009, that more than half the world is middle class thanks to rapid growth in developing countries.

These emerging middle classes constituted the core of the cultural imagination and moral framework of populist parties in emerging economies. Their desire to transform their economic prosperity at the individual level into political status coincided with the geopolitical demands of the populist governments in the non-Western world.

Contrary to the optimism of the modernization theory, which rested on the idea that the rise of the middle class created opportunities for the rise and consolidation of democracy, these new middle classes have become (class) bearers of democratic decline.

Middle-Class War?

The first decade of the AKP was a decade of market expansionism. This expansion created a fragile consensus between these two different groups of middle classes. Although resented the Islamism of the AKP, the booming economy enabled many urban professionals to enter the job market and provided them lucrative jobs, vacations, cars, and homes. It was the period of Istanbul as the global city. There were many opportunities. Money was pouring. And life was different.

However, politically, these urban professionals and status middle classes have never been the backbone of the AKP’s electoral success. They were deeply anxious about its consolidation of power. They tried to create exit options for themselves and their children even when things seemed calm politically, and Turkey was thought to be doing well economically.

Starting from 2011, however, Turkish foreign policy has become more conflictual and assertive with a stronger tone of Islam. The markets were becoming tighter because of global and regional developments. The political tone of the AKP was also becoming more exclusionary as the party consolidated its power. These status middle classes were the first to resist and first to lose.

Not owing it is electoral success to these groups, not sharing their worldviews, and responding to the shrinking market opportunities, the AKP government completely abandoned these status middle classes after 2014. Indeed, these groups (and the need for constant appeasement of them) were seen as an obstacle to actualizing the already broadened expansionary agenda of the AKP both at home and abroad. And the abandonment of these status middle-classes would have become the real force in the socio-political transformation of Turkey.

Middle Class, No More!

What is striking about the current period is the fact that the AKP seems to abandon not just the status middle classes anymore, but also the new middle classes that it owes its success in the last two decades.

As the pro-government newspaper Yeni Şafak columnist İsmail Kılıçarslan clearly states, “Turkey’s social policy was based on the maintenance of the lower classes and the satisfaction of the middle classes.” However, he writes, Turkey now chasing a different type of economy in which the convergence of classes is inevitable. This convergence is happening through the proletarianization of the middle classes.

The new middle classes who saw their status rise in the last two decades, who were able to get their kids a good education by sending them to private schools, who have become the consumers of a booming economy are now being asked to go back to once they were. And it seems that everyone is stuck in traffic and no lane is open anymore to anyone except a handful of export-oriented and labor-intensive sectors.

The question, then, is whether the Islamic conservativism that has become the cementing ideology between the ruling party and these new classes will be enough for the AKP to win the upcoming elections. Or has it always been the booming (new) middle classes and their economic satisfaction behind this two-decade-long victory? In other words, is it ideas or wealth that matters? Is it ideology or class interest that shapes politics? This is the question that the Turkish electorate will be answering (and voting for) soon.