Thus Spoke the Turkmen Beg: Constructing a Moralized Regime of Truth in Post-2023 Türkiye

Resumen

This article analyzes how Devlet Bahçeli’s post-2023 discourse constructs a moralized regime of truth in Türkiye’s competitive authoritarian context. Based on a qualitative analysis of parliamentary speeches and X posts, the study examines how hakikat is framed as a moral and civilizational attribute grounded in national unity, loyalty, and state authority. The findings show that truth is not relativized but recentralized, with dissent recoded as moral and epistemic deviance. Conceptualized as epistemic populism, this discourse fuses populist moral dualism with claims of epistemic authority, transforming truth into a mechanism of political alignment rather than deliberation. The article contributes to post-truth scholarship by highlighting a non-relativist configuration of post-truth politics and advances research on Turkish political communication by foregrounding the epistemic role of nationalist-populist discourse.