Power, Interests and Coalitions: the political economy of mass privatisation in Turkey

Privatisation has been on the policy agenda in Turkey since the mid-1980s. Yet progress was slow throughout the first two decades of the Turkish neoliberal experiment. More recently, however, Turkey has experienced a major privatisation boom in the aftermath of the 2001 crisis. This paper tries to understand the nature of the recent privatisation boom from a political economy perspective and attempts to account for the paradox of the mass or hyper-privatisation experience of Turkey, comparable with Mexico and Argentina in the 1990s. A key concept here is the ‘pro-privatization coalition’. An attempt is made to understand how this coalition is progressively strengthened while the power of the anti-privatisation coalition has been undermined in the post-2001 era. An interesting insight in this context concerns the importance of legal and institutional changes which also help to shift the balance from the anti- to the pro-privatization coalition. The final part of the paper aims to study the changing nature of resistance to privatisation by selective references to the opposition to some of the major privatisation deals in Turkey.