Version imprimableIan Parker: We suggested ’creeping fascism’ as a topic partly because of where Britain is. Fascism seems to be knocking on the door here, with Reform UK and the rest of it, and the implication was that Turkey might have lessons for us. Is that the right way round?
Can Koçak: Partly. There is that element to it, and I don’t want to dismiss it. But fascism is also something that creeps in and of itself. It permeates gradually within everyday life. In the Turkish context we’re talking about institutions hollowed out from within, the media gradually instrumentalised, and no single step that looks like the end of democracy. Nobody announces that democracy ends now and fascism begins now. It’s the sum total that adds up to an authoritarian order.
I’d want to say one thing about the framing, though. This shouldn’t be a moment of remembrance, or of pity for supposedly lost-cause countries. For a genuinely internationalist and anti-imperialist solidarity, we have to remember this is the same struggle. It isn’t ’you tell us about your context so we’ll be better prepared for ours’. It’s coming together to fight a common struggle.
Turnout in Turkish elections is very high, much higher than here. Is that a sign of health?
In one sense, yes. It suggests people are interested, invested in politics. But I’d argue it’s also a problem, because it’s the only way people can participate in politics in Turkey. Every other route has been hollowed out, narrowed or cut off.
That’s why the three themes that came out of our last general congress, in November 2025, a few months ago, or not a few months ago, almost a year ago now, time moves fast, were independence, democracy and socialism. When we talk about democracy in that sense we mean opening up new ways for people to take part in politics, to take their own fate into their own hands.
The figure, and I should have checked this before coming here, is somewhere in the high eighties. Eighty per cent or so. [2]
And the cost of that fixation?
Two things. You start building saviour narratives. X person is going to come and save us; X person is going to found a new party, they’ll be the candidate at the next presidential election, they’ll save us. What has happened among the opposition in Turkey, and I find myself admitting that left politics in Turkey has fallen into this trap time and time again, is that after every defeat comes a search for a new leader, a new party. Those searches are a form of escape. Finding the next right leader takes far less effort than organising, than talking to people and persuading them, than patiently building relationships and programmes and new forms of solidarity. Someone is going to come and do it for us.
The second thing is that you get caught up in narratives. You look at opinion polls and say, well, this time they’re definitely going to lose, surely they can’t recover from this. I gather you have similar discourses here. Surely Nigel Farage cannot survive that five million pound donation story.
In 2023 you had an economic crisis and an earthquake, and Erdoğan still won.
He did. The AKP became the first party again and formed the government again. Twenty-four years in power now; they came in in 2002.
You can tie that to a few things. The economic crisis was real and it was hurting people. But authoritarian regimes like this survive not only through force, and force is a real cause as well, but through their historical and ideological alliance with capital itself. That’s how an economic crisis doesn’t necessarily translate into electoral defeat.
More pragmatically, there is the opposition’s fragmentation. The labour movement, the ecological movement, the women’s movement, LGBT movements, city rights movements: all of them have a relatively strong showing, all have made significant historical gains, and all have failed to coordinate around a shared programme. A left alternative has to find the programme that brings those disparate struggles together.
You call it the palace regime. What has changed in how it talks about itself?
After two decades in power they no longer feel obliged to legitimise themselves as a political party. They speak in the name of the state itself. They call it the reason of the state, or the intellect of the state. Rather than explaining themselves to the opposition and to the people, they demand that the opposition explain why they aren’t standing with the state. Because I represent the reason of the state, so why aren’t you with me? That’s the rationale.
That discourse disarms a playbook the opposition finds very handy: exposing contradictions and chasing scandals. Two years ago you were saying X, now you’re saying Y. It doesn’t really matter when the other side is claiming to represent the state itself.
Someone in the room found that strange. Farage would say he represents the nation against the state. Trump says he represents the people against the state. Embodying the state seems unusual for the far right.
That’s a very good point. It almost feels like saying we represent the establishment. But there’s a nuance, because it’s close to how Trump champions American values, or Farage champions British values, a true understanding of what Britishness looks like. I think the intellect of the state means something closer to that.
Globally we see the regime as part of what we call a dark order, or a far-right international. Look at the ties and alliances with other authoritarian contexts, all of those regimes supported by the US and the various Trumps, even though verbally they seem to be at odds. I’d add Netanyahu’s regime to the dark order too, in alliance with Erdoğan.
You said the left has things it needs to overcome. What are they?
First, that internal polemical culture, the opportunistic point-scoring off each other’s mistakes. [3] My metaphor for this is football. Think of the five-a-side games you play with friends: informal rules, and critically no offside. So it’s very easy to wait in the opposition’s half for the ball to come to you and score an easy goal. I find that in leftist politics as well.
Then there’s the sectarian cliquishness that produces micro-neighbourhoods where any outside contact almost feels like contamination.
And then the thing we’ve been talking about, letting the expectation of a new party or a new saviour substitute for real organising. What we want instead is a left that puts down roots locally, that accumulates concrete wins even if they’re small, and that doesn’t burn its energy fighting among ourselves.
How does that work in practice for your party, which does take elections seriously?
We feel there should be other ways of doing things, but elections are also the thing that legally mobilises people in Turkey, so you play into that. Ideally we treat elections not as the end goal but as a tool. Our ultimate aim is to bring the working class to power, and we know that might not happen at the next election. But we try to become powerful enough to be relevant in the politics that mobilises people.
We’re very active in unions. Over the past couple of years we’ve organised a lot of local public meetings, including in local marketplaces, which has proved very useful.
We were asked about political diversity within Turkey, and about the Kurdish question in particular. Where does your party stand on self-determination?
Very clearly, we see it the way Lenin saw it: the right of peoples to determine their own future.
We’ve historically been in electoral alliance with Kurdish parties. And that’s why our name is not the Turkish Workers’ Party but the Workers’ Party of Turkey, to cover the different ethnicities within Turkey.
And the peace process?
There has seemingly been a move towards recognising Kurdish identity a little further. What the regime is doing can be summarised as: urbanise, adapt and obey. There’s a visibility of identity, a recognition of identity to some extent, alongside the suppression of political rights. Kurdish politicians, leftist Turkish politicians, activists, even comedians, are jailed for this and that. One of our MPs, whose name is in fact the same as mine, Can Atalay, has been imprisoned for years despite national rulings and European Court of Human Rights rulings against it. So visibility and suppression go hand in hand. A depoliticisation through recognition.
I’ll give you the football version, and I’m sorry, this is my second football reference. The biggest city in the east is Diyarbakır, with the biggest Kurdish population, and it has a team called Amedspor, Amed being the Kurdish name for Diyarbakır. Which brings us back to names again, because there’s a tension over what these cities are called. Amedspor are in the top league now, and with nationalism rising they meet animosity and racist chants wherever they go. Kurdish people tend to be very politically aware, almost necessarily so. And a piece I read argued that in the stadium they answer the racist chants with wilder chants of their own, using racist or sexist language themselves. Football rivalry becomes the means of depoliticisation. That fits the paradigm of urbanise, adapt and obey too.
A Turkish comrade in the room put the peace process in a regional frame, dating it from the collapse of Assad, and reading it as the consequence of imperial interests needing the PKK out of the way before they can deal with the new Syrian state. Talks between Erdoğan and Öcalan came three or four months after Damascus fell, and the argument was that this is one connected project rather than an accident.
I’d take that seriously, and it made me think about something adjacent, which is how contextual these things are. There’s a real tension around Islamist regimes in the Middle East and Islamophobia in the West, and the two clash inside left movements in different parts of the world, because the left in Turkey and elsewhere in the region has actually suffered under Islamist regimes.
That’s also a way of describing how fascism creeps. What the broader secular movement in Turkey has feared for decades is: are we going to be ruled by Sharia law? What the left kept trying to say is that nobody arrives and announces that from tomorrow we’re ruled by Sharia. It’s the everyday implementations that change your day-to-day life. People get beaten up for drinking water during Ramadan. That happens in Turkey. Every year.
Then take it to the West. Coming here from London I stopped at Stockport, which reminded me of the stabbings a couple of years ago. Sorry, Southport, similarly named town. With the online disinformation people decided the perpetrator was a Muslim man, which he wasn’t, and they attacked Muslims and mosques. So Islamophobia is a serious problem in this context, and in an internationalist frame these are the things we need to think about collectively. We rarely do.
We were asked whether Turkey has a mass movement or only elections. Britain arguably has nothing but elections, which is why every new left party here has been built around one named politician who was never going to be half as good as we hoped.
More broadly it’s similar in Turkey. It’s focused on electoral politics, on party politics. But there are noteworthy wins from workers’ movements and unions. The miners especially have been very vocal recently, with multiple rounds of successful strikes and hunger strikes. So you see small but significant wins. Generally, though, the same electoral focus.
We think of fascism as arising from the defeat of the working class, from the demoralisation of failure, and from the ruling class running out of other options. One comrade argued that Britain doesn’t have the strong organised left that would frighten capital into that solution, so we might not be sliding towards a pure fascism. For Turkey to go for it, there would have to be a deep crisis and no other way of holding power. Are you at that point?
I do think we have been at that point for some time now.
That argument is interesting though. When we talk about a new party, a new leader, a new saviour, I was also thinking about the safe centre. I was thinking of Andy Burnham, to be fair. And if you compare it with the early twentieth century, the whole equilibrium has shifted somewhat to the right. You don’t get that many left options. It almost feels as though the far right has become relatively common sense.
Independence was one of your three congress themes. From a British vantage point that word has a bad ring, because we’re an old imperial power.
This is a more metaphorical independence than a formal one. Turkey is an independent state, an independent republic. But look at the relationships. We feel the current regime does a lot of America’s, Trump’s, or the West’s bidding. Erdoğan used Syrian and Afghan migrants as bargaining chips against Europe: unless you give me X and Y, I’ll release these people onto European soil. Their relationship with Trump, with America, and, regardless of what they say, with Israel, is tied to what those powers want Turkey to become. It sometimes feels as though we’re the henchmen, the hench-nation, of this Trumpian order in the Middle East.
A comrade in the room, wearing his historian’s hat, pointed out that Turkey sits at the pressure point between three continents, which is why the city has been Byzantium, Constantinople and Istanbul in turn. He raised the Mecca defence pact signed in August with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and the first committee meeting held in Istanbul the week before ours, and read it as a new sub-imperial bloc feeling its way into being, trying to create space against Russia, against China, against the US and the EU. [4]
I’d agree it’s a new kind of coalition against Russia and China, but I wouldn’t say it’s against NATO more broadly. It’s a different kind of alliance, and it’s precisely the type of alliance that compels these nations, Turkey included, to play the role I was just describing: the role the US has set for them in the Middle East.
Does the regime look back to the Ottomans or to Atatürk?
Predominantly the Ottomans, and the secular-versus-Islamist divide comes mainly out of the Erdoğan regime’s early clashes with the republican regime, whose whole vision was integration with the West. But what has happened is that they’ve started to reconcile with Atatürk as a figure. Their newer discourse places Atatürk and Erdoğan as our two founding fathers. They’re no longer in institutional clash with the Republic. They’re saying: you had a hundred years of that, now we’ll have a hundred years of our second founding father.
You wanted to end on Louis XVI.
On 14 July 1789 he wrote in his journal: nothing major happened today [5] He used the journal for the days he went hunting, and he hadn’t gone hunting, so nothing major had happened. He had failed to register the defining moment of the century.
The moral is that the breaking points of history are usually missed by the people living through them. Which is why I don’t think we can trust two very radical sentiments. One is the certainty of pessimism, nothing’s going to change, we can’t change anything. The other is the optimism of I’ve looked at the polls and so-and-so is definitely losing. What determines the moment is the social and organisational foundation we build before the moment arrives.
2 September 2026
