ABSTRACT
What one could call ‘Erdoğanism’ preserves the formal institutions of a liberal democracy, but in reality defines itself as a radical, national and virile alternative to the corrupted ‘liberal democracy’. It does not only understand “politics as war”; all the indicators show that the regime has waged a war against society’s cognitive faculties and that it is winning, at the cost of a loss of all rationality, including that necessary for its own stability. A simple look at the chronology of events post-2013 shows that Erdoğanism cannot anchor itself in time without provoking cycles of new crises: each campaign against a given enemy occupies all the media space during several months, before losing in intensity and leaving the space for a new phase of hyper-mobilisation. These cycles produce cumulative effects that nourish a vision of a world at war.
