Erdoğanism; Populism as a "Political Strategy

Gaining power by the Justice and Development Party with a democratic and pragmatic face was a new voice in Turkey's political environment which managed to reflect and represent the real issues of the society and be popular with the public. However, since 2013, the ruling Justice and Development Party has transformed from a popular quasi-democratic political party to an exclusionary populist party; In a way that most theorists of populism, many analysts of Turkish issues, as well as writers of prominent news media such as Guardian, Bloomberg, New York Times and Foreign Policy, called Erdogan and his party "populist". Accordingly, the current research, by using the theoretical framework of populism, especially the ideas of people like Kurt Wieland, Robert Barr, Kenneth Roberts, and Pappas, in the form of "populism as a political strategy", tries to answer this main question that what the causes of Erdogan and the Justice and Development Party's tendency towards populism were in the last decade; And how did Erdoğan utilize populism to achieve his desired goals? The findings show that, in the last decade, relying on populist tools and positions such as the foreign status of political actors, anti-establishment attraction, personal ties, unorganized mobilization, etc., Erdogan has artistically used populism as a "political project to build and maintain power" for himself and his party. The research approach is political sociology, qualitative research method, causal explanation type and data collection method, library, and also using virtual resources.