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Introduction
In 2013, Brazil and Turkey were suddenly in the international spotlight for hosting massive waves of street protests, ultimately challenging ruling parties that had been solidly in power, at that time, for more than a decade. Since 2013, social and political tensions have culminated. In 2016, a parliamentary and judiciary coup d’état in Brazil removed the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers Party – PT) from power, and a failed military coup in Turkey was followed by widespread authoritarian repression by the governing Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party – AKP). The two countries are very different culturally, historically and geographically, yet they went through a very similar pattern of socio-political polarization, which ultimately explains the breakdown of the existing democratic institutions in both countries.
Having come of age ‘from below’ and obtained power as political outsiders to the respective traditional systems, AKP and PT ruled uninterruptedly after 2002 (Turkey) and 2003 (Brazil), with increasing support from the poor. Electoral politics in both countries have been accompanied by social and cultural tensions, resulting in extra-parliamentary forms of conflict and struggle, ranging from protest waves to military and parliamentary coups and judiciary interventions. Both parties reached power during periods of deep economic crisis that brought substantial impoverishment and unemployment. Once in office they both relied on an ideology of economic growth as the main pillar for maintaining power, generated generous pro-poor policies domestically, and attempted to join the powers-that-be internationally.
We argue that while ruling culturally, historically and geographically very different countries, and coming from ideologically opposite poles (left trade-unionism for the PT and radical Islamism for the AKP), the two governments converged on the same path of ‘governing the poor’ as part of their strategy of maintaining power. We argue that this happened because, notwithstanding the ideological differences, in both countries governments have been facing a declining capacity to frame developments and establish class alliances with more structured sectors of the society (including big capital and the middle and organized working classes) because of the neoliberal re-organization and internationalization of their economies. The poor have emerged as a critical social base from which these ambitious political parties could derive political power for their long-term domestic and international political projects. Both political parties have historically...