Discursive Obstructionism: How Populists Undermine Global Technocracy Without Exit

This paper theorizes populist obstructionism as a strategy through which populist actors seek to erode the authority of global governance institutions for domestic and international audiences while maintaining formal engagement. Engaging in discursive obstructionism, defined as the systematic reframing of international organizations’ technocratic mandates as illegitimate external interference, they erode their mandate. The paper focuses on the interaction between Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) (a prominent example of populism) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a cornerstone institution of global economic governance with a central role in the surveillance of national economies and the provision of macroeconomic policy advice. Using sentiment and automated text analysis, the study shows how the AKP constructs the IMF’s technical surveillance as a “conspiratorial attack” on national sovereignty. We argue that the political-economic coalition that sustains the AKP government is fundamentally at odds with the macroeconomic principles and advice of the IMF. Particularly, following earlier studies on the AKP, we argue that an intricate web of corruption, crony capitalist relationship between business groups and AKP elites, clientelism, and vote buying via selective social welfare benefits ensure political support for the Party. Heeding the Fund’s advice, therefore, would indeed mean that the AKP cannot sustain its political-economic coalition that keeps it in power. The AKP leadership responds to the conflict by targeting the legitimacy of the Fund’s macroeconomic advice. It mobilizes economic nationalism and sovereignty arguments. We identify three broad strategies in the populist AKP’s engagement with the IMF. Firstly, the AKP leadership repeatedly invokes the painful memory of the 2001 economic crisis and the IMF-supported economic program that was implemented at the time to delegitimize the Fund’s current macroeconomic advice. Secondly, they equate domestic ‘others’ (the main opposition party that is painted as ‘elite’, ‘other’, and ‘impure’, and the perpetrators of the 2016 coup attempts) with international ‘others’, drawing a parallel between the two. Thirdly, the AKP leadership resorts to conspiracy theories such as global forces and financial centres waging a war against the Turkish lira under the IMF’s umbrella. Finally, in conjunction with the personalization of the rule in domestic politics, Erdogan himself is painted as the defender of ‘national sovereignty’. This populist rhetorical strategy of the AKP not only shields domestic policy choices from external scrutiny but also delegitimizes the IMF’s broader epistemic authority as a technocratic advisor. The paper argues that such discursive obstructionism is consequential beyond the Turkish case: populist actors learn from one another, diffusing communicative repertoires that collectively weaken the normative foundations of global economic governance. The analysis thus contributes to theories of obstructionism by identifying its discursive dimension.