Anti-elitism, the JDP and the Kurdish Voters in Turkey

This paper aims to understand how a party with roots in a religious movement has managed to appeal to an ethnic group that has traditionally supported ethnonationalist parties. The Justice and Development Party (JDP) in Turkey was founded as a new ‘conservative democratic’ party in 2001 following the closure of its mother party that represented an Islamist movement. For a decade in the 2000s, the JDP came to power gaining the electoral support of the Kurds and challenged the power of the pro-Kurdish parties in the Kurdish-populated regions. The literature has so far explained this shift as a result of the JDP’s promise of cultural rights to Kurds, its focus on socioeconomic development or religious identity. Drawing upon interviews conducted with the pro-Kurdish party and the JDP activists, this paper argues that the JDP’s appeal to the Kurds in the 2000s was also related to its ‘outsider’ identity that confronted the Turkish state ideology. Since the state ideology in Turkey conventionally defined both the Kurds and the Islamists as ‘outsiders’, the JDP’s transgression of its Islamist roots and embracement of an ‘outsider’ identity in the form of 'anti-elitism' in the Kurdish-populated regions gained the support of many Kurdish voters.