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Heroes, villains and celebritisation of politics: hegemony, populism and anti-intellectualism in Turkey

ABSTRACT This article analyses the rising tides of celebrity politics in Turkey by contextualising it within the changing dynamics of Turkish politics during the last decade. More specifically, it tries to understand the fault lines of celebritisation of politics with reference to the installation and re-installation of the neoliberal conservative hegemony. Celebrity politics in Turkey has acquired a unique character within a political environment where the tides of social opposition are very high and as a trend of de-democratisation has been hanging over the country. This is what makes the content and nature of celebrity politics in Turkey different from the general tendency in the world, as the most widespread form of celebrity politics is the advocacy of policy matters such as philanthropy and raising awareness on sensitive and noble human causes. In Turkey, the existing neoliberal conservative hegemony, since its first installation, has been able to find new and/or different ways of consolidating, revising, shifting, and re-installing itself, and it has done this by finding new ways of creating the collective identities of us versus them. It is the argument of this study that celebrity politics has been one of the latest resorts in that task.