International Conference on Political Sociology - Democracy and Society: Challenges, Risks and Opportunities for Contemporary Democracy, Bologna, İtalya, 10 - 12 Ekim 2024, ss.1
As a result of the civil war that started in Syria in 2011, Türkiye received the immigration of nearly 4 million people from this country in the following years. In the last decade, this was followed by another wave of migration from other unstable countries such as Afghanistan. Research has shown that voters of almost every party in Turkish politics have a remarkable negative reaction to this influx of immigrants. Although various political actors have expressed the uneasiness and grievances prevalent in Turkish society related to this issue to some extent to date, the first party to put it at the center of its discourse was the Victory Party (Turkish: Zafer Partisi, ZP), established in August 2021 under the leadership of Ümit Özdağ. Since its establishment, the party stated that when it came to power, it would send Syrian refugees and immigrants who entered the country illegally to their homeland, claiming that their total number exceeded 10 million. However, the party could only reach 2.23% in the first general election in May 2023 and 2.59% in the local elections in April 2024. Considering both the surveys on Turkish society’s view of refugees and immigrants and the vote rates reached by anti-immigrant political parties in many European countries that receive intense immigration, it is possible to say that these vote rates are quite limited. Although this situation brings with it many questions that need to be answered, two of them stand out, which can be regarded as interrelated: 1) What are the conditions that prevent anti-immigrant attitudes from coming to the fore as a determining factor in Turkish politics? 2) What are the specific factors that resulted in the relative failure of the ZP, which placed these attitudes at the center of its party program and political discourse? The study attempts to find answers to these questions by examining the themes on which the main lines of party politics in Türkiye are formed and the views of voters of other parties and party elites on the immigration issue. Thus, it also aims to make sense of the fact that the anti-immigrant attitude is relatively overshadowed or not decisive among the factors affecting voter decisions in the Turkish case.