Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
JOURNAL OF POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES, ss.1-21, 2025 (SSCI)
Erdoğan’s master discourse, ‘the servant of the nation,’ has long served as one of the ideological pillars in establishing the hegemonic power of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP). However, the COVID-19 pandemic crisis dislocated the AKP’s hegemonic regime of serving the people. Following the victory of the Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP) in metropolitan cities in the 2019 local elections, the mayors of the metropolitan municipalities independently launched relief campaigns for citizens in lockdown. In response, the AKP government authorized central state agents to deliver aid and meet the needs of the people. They went even further in obstructing local efforts by blocking citizen donations to opposition municipalities. This paper problematizes the transformation of pandemic social services into public contestation between the AKP-state government and the CHP municipalities. In doing so, we analyze data from online national media outlets by tracing logics of equivalence and difference in the discourse of both pro-AKP and opposition media. We further identify the convergent and divergent discursive strategies of both parties, squarely placing them within the debates surrounding authoritarianism and the historical context of hegemonic struggle.