This article examines transition in Kocaeli, an industrial city in the north-western part of Turkey, away from left-wing politics and trade unionism in the early 1970s, and toward Islamic politics from the mid-1990s onwards. It does do by investigating the ideological, political, and social transformation of the working class. Based on fieldwork involving in-depth, semistructured interviews conducted with current and former workers and trade union leaders, the article analyzes the various aspects of, and limits to, the hegemonic relationships between workers and left-wing politics on the one hand, and with Islamic politics, on the other.

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Following the 2017 constitutional referendum under the Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (Justice and Development Party‐AKP) rule in Turkey, the reforms granted judicial and legislative powers to the head of the executive under a presidential system. Initial observations reveal that some blue‐collar workers who are members of a historically progressive union have also supported these reforms. This is surprising because the union leadership has publicly opposed these changes. What explains this discrepancy? Why did some of these workers support reforms in favour of a powerful executive? Based on a sample from a major metalworking union, this paper finds that partisan identity moderates support for AKP's push for challenging the separation of powers. Although we find that higher amount of debt may reduce worker support for stronger executive, this is conditional on the metal workers' pre‐existing partisan commitments. Under these circumstances, highly indebted partisan workers do not diverge from the party line. These results also raise further questions for students of labour and regime change elsewhere in the developing world.