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Turkey recently left behind the 2023 Parliamentary and Presidential elections in which the refugee issue was among the top agenda items in the campaigns of the parties.  The refugee issue is not a new one in Turkey. It was on the table in the 2018 national and 2019 local elections, but it was only extremely politicized recently when parties took explicit anti-refugee stances in the recent election. Several party campaigns were marked by promises to repatriate Syrian refugees. It is important to examine these stances closely, because the issue will likely retain its political salience in the upcoming local elections, scheduled for 31 March 2024. The politicization of the refugee issue may be even more vivid in the electoral competition for mega-industrial cities like Istanbul, Gaziantep,  Mersin, Adana, Mersin, and Bursa which are hosting large numbers of Syrian refugees.

For example, to gain public appeal and in order to fight against the long-running populist discourses of the ruling party AKP, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) has embraced a populist position since the 2019 local elections. One strong element in the CHP’s populism is an anti-Syrian stance narrated as one reason for the economic hardships experienced by Turkish people. The domestic audience was attentive because anti-Syrian sentiments and populist narratives have been rising in recent years through a deepening recession, soaring unemployment, and inflation. 

The 2023 election campaign also saw the emergence of a purely anti-immigrant and populist political party the Zafer Party, which centered its election campaign on the slogan: “When the Zafer Party comes, all asylum seekers will return.” In a similar vein, Sinan Oğan, the president candidate of the nationalist ATA Alliance, also used an explicit anti-refugee discourse. Although both party’s share of the vote was tiny, they propelled the anti-refugee narrative and pushed other parties to embrace more radical discourses and build alliances with the main blocs in the second round.  While Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the joint candidate of the opposition bloc (CHP together with 5 other parties), took a relatively moderate stance on the return of Syrians before the elections, he embraced more anti-refugee narratives and did not hesitate to sign a protocol with Ümit Özdağ (Zafer Party) in the second round of the elections. Sinan Oğan who received a critical 5.1 percent of the votes in the first round of the election, placed a conditionality over the refugee issue. His party promised to support the candidate who would take radical steps on refugees.

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This blog post was first published at GAPs Blog on July 10, 2023.

Find out more about our GAPs project: https://www.returnmigration.eu