Understanding Center Right Politics

TODAY'S ZAMAN: "IHSAN DAGI i.dagi@todayszaman.com
Understanding Center Right Politics

Many analysts referring to the failure of the merger between the True Path Party (DYP) and the Motherland Party (ANAVATAN) raise the question: What has happened to the center right?
The center right has always maintained a critical distance from the state. Once a center-right political movement gets too close to the state, the state elite and the state discourse, it ceases to perform its basic function in politics: the representation of peripheral identities, interests and priorities vis-à-vis the bureaucratic center. These two political parties, the DYP and ANAVATAN, could not pass the 10 percent national threshold in the 2002 elections, since they were viewed by the center-right voters as incapable of carrying the social, political and economic periphery into the center. This burden was then put upon the Justice and Development Party (AK Party), which nowadays struggles to overcome the resistance of the bureaucratic/ideological center.

For center-right politics, the supremacy of the nation as reflected in parliamentary elections is a key political theme. This is often criticized as a tendency for majoritarian democracy, or ballot-box democracy. But historically speaking the masses did not have anything else (representation in the high-state bureaucracy or the bourgeois) but their votes. The ballot box was the only"