One of the hot topics in Turkish politics these days is the schism among “the liberals,” a political group whose voting power is minimal, but whose intellectual power is phenomenal. Although they still share many common goals about the future of Turkey, they now seem to have quite diverging views on how to get there, and, especially, on whether the AKP (Justice Development Party) is an asset or a threat.
To look deeper into this, let me first explain who “the liberals” are in the Turkish context. These are public intellectuals who arose mainly in the '90s, and as an independent force from the country’s two major political blocks: Secular Kemalists (followers of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk) and religious conservatives. Most liberals were secular themselves, if not outright atheists, but they strongly disagreed with the self-styled authoritarian secularism and illiberal nationalism of the Kemalist establishment. They, for example, defended the right to wear headscarves in universities, criticizing a ban imposed and passionately defended by the Kemalists and bitterly opposed by the religious conservatives. The liberals also condemned military coups, “military tutelage” on politics, and “militarism” with regards to the Kurdish question or the Cyprus conundrum. As an alternative, they defended the European Union criteria and universal standards of liberal democracy.
