The Impact of Identity Politics and Identity Struggles on the Relationship Between the RPP and the Social Democracy

The rise of identity politics directly influenced the left in the last few decades. Within this context, the questions “How social democracy is influenced by identity politics?” and “How its attitude towards them must be?” are the cornerstones of an important discussion topic. The major center-left political actor of Turkish politics, the RPP s approach to this issue is the main concern of this study. The in-depth interviews conducted with more than a hundred RPP members in the cities of Bursa, Erzurum, Gaziantep, İzmir and Kocaeli provided significant data. During the interviews, important observations have been made on the cleavages such as Turkishness-Kurdishness and Sunnism-Alevism as well as on the issues like nationalism, Islamism, and secularism.