The AK Party, 10 years later

There is no doubt that the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) is a success story. It is now celebrating its 10th anniversary and the party has been ruling the country for nine out of those 10 years.

This has been achieved despite the party leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan having been sentenced to a prison term when he was removed from his position as mayor of İstanbul and sent to prison just before founding the AK Party. So this party did not emerge from a position of strength but rather from disadvantage, to become the central actor in Turkish politics over the last 10 years.

The AK Party's success lies in the ability of its founding leaders to transform an Islamist movement, Necmettin Erbakan's Milli Görüş (National View), into a center-right mass political party. This took place at a time when conventional center-right parties and leaders like Süleyman Demirel had aligned themselves with the military and secularist forces, which alienated their conservative and anti-militarist social sectors, who were attracted by the AK Party's conservative and anti-militarist discourse.

In this context, the way in which Islamic social, political and economic actors were treated by the secularist establishment, led by the military and the judiciary, played a crucial and educating role for Islamic circles. During the Feb. 28 process, the so-called postmodern coup era, from 1997 to 1999 their political parties were banned, their NGOs were intimidated and closed down, and their businesses were boycotted.

The suppression of Islamic groups by the secularist establishment certainly played a role in speeding up and even facilitating a process of transformation. But there was more of an internal debate on how to survive politically, economically and socially in a strictly secularist and authoritarian environment. It seemed that the old way of confronting secularist opponents directly and on their own was bound to fail. They needed a new strategy, if not to come to power, certainly to secure protection vis-à-vis undemocratic and unlawful pressure by the secularist establishment.

The AK Party is the result of this search for security. But the new political strategy, the language developed and the circumstances in which all these took place were so positive that they came to power in the first general elections.

It would, however, be a mistake to explain the rise of the AK Party by merely looking at the political landscape. The leadership, identity, and policies of the party were also shaped by the emerging conservative middle class and business elites who had started to flourish in the mid-1980s under the liberalizing and export-oriented policies of Turgut Özal. Their expansion had been blocked in the late 1990s by an alliance of the secularist İstanbul based business elites and the military during the so-called Feb. 28 process, in which pro-Islamic Erbakan was forced to resign as prime minister in the summer of 1997. Their companies were blacklisted as “Islamist capital,” their associations were intimidated and some were even tried.

The new conservative business elite came to realize that the rise of Islamism under the banner of the Welfare Party (RP) was detrimental to their business interests and social existence.

Islamist intellectuals, NGO activists, journalists, etc., all experienced similar pressures. To get out of secularist pressures they needed to build alliances with non-religious, secular but democratic social and intellectual circles.

In order to do this first, they had to reform their political language, adopting democracy, human rights, liberties, pluralism and the rule of law as central values of the party. This was certainly a significant departure from a self-referential ambiguous Islamist terminology. This way, former Islamists were able to reach out to new social and political groups beyond religious people. In fact, the AK Party managed to develop a “shared agenda” with non-religious segments of society. Democratization, liberalization, EU membership and economic development were the key factors in these shared objectives. Thus the party assumed the role of an agency bestowed with transforming the authoritarian politics of Turkey and opening it up to the world.

Over the years it has been hard to deny that the AK Party has done pretty well. Winning a third consecutive term is proof that it has satisfied people's needs and demands. It has emerged as the most reformist party in Turkey in terms of democratization, the Kurdish question and civil-military relations.

The question now is whether the AK Party will remain this way, given resisting bureaucratic and judicial forces have been significantly weakened. In other words, will the AK Party be a reformist party on its own when it no longer feels insecure in a new constitutional and institutional environment?