Radical Plural Democratic Party HDP’s “Another Turkey” Proposition: Adversary Politics, Agonism and Populism

This paper analyses the HDP‟s alternative and left-leaning populist politics in a democratic political life of Turkey through “Turkeyfication”, “new life”, “great humanity” and “we‟re” discourses, particularly before the 7 June 2015 election momentum, while it focuses the impacts of this new “the political” of the HDP on the social and political issues such as conflict resolution and the so-called peace process with offering an agonistic pluralism. As a result, the HDP‟s new political imagination and ontology is articulating a new antagonism, which demands what I call “another Turkey” and which can be seen as a hegemonic struggle involving the rhetoric of the “old Turkey” and the “new Turkey” which also allows us to indicate endeavouring for a notion of radical political identity and radical citizenship. In doing so, the paper employing Chantal Mouffe‟s agonistic theoretical approach, offers a frame of agonistic debate in order to understand how conflict can remain at the centre of politics and the transformation of antagonistic relation into adversary politics which would eventually end in radical democracy as a result of new hegemonic relations and the formation of collective identity.