The Vulnerability of Hope and Optimism: Reflecting on Turkey’s 2023 Elections
In May, Turkey held one of the most consequential elections in its recent history. The vote took place amid a deepening economic crisis, one of the deadliest earthquakes of the last century, and an expanded realm of oppression targeting almost all fields of social and political life. What made the elections of May 2023 more contested than their predecessors was that it was the first time in the last two decades, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) were not viewed as the clear favorites.
Derya Özkaya
Derya Özkaya is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Centre for Southeast European Studies (CSEES) at the University of Graz. Her academic research interests are primarily centered on the politics of affect and collective emotions, protest movements, transformative grassroots politics, urban movements, collective memory, political ethnography, and contemporary politics of Turkey. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Sciences from the Otto-Suhr-Institute of Political Science at Freie Universität Berlin.