February 1978. Turkey is torn apart by violence between left and right groups. The Gray Wolves, nickname for far-right activists, confront left-wing activists, weapons in hand. In Maras, Çorum and Malatya, they perpetrated real massacres against the populations of certain neighborhoods won over to the left and populated by Alevi (a heterodox religion inspired by Shiism, which represents between 15 and 20% of the population). That morning, well-informed police set up a roadblock on one of the entry ways to the capital, Ankara, and stopped a white Renault coming from the city of Adana.
In the trunk, clumsily concealed under oranges, several Kalashnikov rifles. The vehicle belongs to a certain Devlet Bahçeli, a young lecturer at the Faculty of Economics in Ankara, sympathizer of the extreme right. He will not be worried by the police, rather favorable to his “cause”…
An indispensable ally to Erdogan
Forty-five years later, Devlet Bahçeli is close to the peaks of Turkey. Or at least its undisputed leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. At the head of the MHP – the great far-right Turkish party – for 25 years, Bahçeli concluded a very advantageous agreement with the stay in 2017, when the latter lacked allies to pass his referendum establishing an ultra-presidential regime in Turkey. The MHP joins the ranks of power, the referendum narrowly passes and Erdogan wins the presidential election and grants himself full powers.
From this alliance, the MHP does not even withdraw a ministry, but is granted several advantages. The power agrees to release underworld figures close to the party, including the famous godfather Alaatin Çakici, imprisoned for a series of crimes, including the murder of his wife and nephew. The doors of the public service open even more widely to the Gray Wolves, who invest justice and especially the security forces. In the special forces, a funny mustache becomes the norm on the faces: those called “crescent”, an old sign of recognition of Turkish fascism. With the eyebrows, they form three crescents, the sign of the MHP, also called “wolf fang”, the totem animal of the Turkish far right.
Above all, the alliance with the MHP has anchored Erdogan’s party to the far right, preventing it from advancing towards appeasement around the Kurdish question, pushing for the imprisonment of intellectuals, journalists or patrons suspected of wanting to pervert the “national values” of Turkey. With Bahçeli at his side, President Erdogan agrees to get rid of Islamist universalism to marry a racialist and demanding nationalism, paranoid and conspiratorial in his relationship to the outside world. “This alliance has changed the ideological positions of the two actors, leading the AKP to become more and more nationalist, and the MHP to Islamize and to make concessions on secularism”, notes Kemal Can, specialist in the extreme Turkish right.
A delicate position for the elections of May 14
Having become the indispensable partner of the AKP, Bahçeli is suffering from Erdogan’s loss of popularity before the May 14 elections. Visiting his stronghold of Osmaniye devastated by the double earthquake in February, he was booed by a crowd who criticized the government for its poor management of relief operations. The leader of the MHP must also face competition from the very right-wing Meral Aksener, a dissident of his party who has made an alliance with the opposition and continues to steal his voters. Finally, the murder in January of Sinan Ates, a young figure in the “idealistic” succession of the Gray Wolves, further aggravated the hemorrhage of militants. Shot by drug traffickers with the complicity of elite police, he had been critical of the party’s old guard….
At 75, Bahçeli now seems preoccupied with his political survival. Hence perhaps his choice not to campaign with the AKP for the parliamentary elections on May 14 and to present his own candidates. A way to allow themselves room for maneuver in the event of a resounding defeat of the ruling party. “If Erdogan loses by a short head, the coalition may have a future, but if he is beaten soundly, it could well implode”, warns Kemal Can. “Wolves don’t eat each other”, says the proverb. Except when they are grey?