Since he won his first elections 20 years ago, the Akp of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has evolved from a party that presented himself as a Muslim version of the European Christian democracy to one in which Islamist principles they buried liberal ideas.
Since that November 3, 2002 victory and Erdogan’s election as prime minister six months later, the party and its leader have become hegemonic in the country, controlling politics, the economy, religion and the media.
Although the AKP was born out of the Turkish Islamist Party which had been banned and re-founded four times since 1970, their approaches were different and explain, in part, its success.
Instead of the Koran, the AKP youth claimed the democratic principles of the European Union against the secular nationalism imposed by the Army, also resorting to coups d’état, and equated themselves to the Christian Democrats, uniting religious inspiration with liberal ideas which has attracted sectors of the centre-left.
His first battle horse was the defense of the Islamic veilthat the 1980 military coup government banned in the public sector and universities.
That debate forged the image of a party that defends the devout populationunder constant attack by the state and the secular upper classes.
At the same time, the AKP gained reputation as a good managerenhancing public services with privatization and investment in a country ruined by inflation up to 100%, and taking credit for the economic recovery initiated by the previous government.
Clash with the Armed Forces
In 2007, the party was launched an attack on the supremacy of the Armed Forcesguardians of secular order, who in 1997 had forced the fall of an Islamist executive.
To do this, the AKP allied with the Islamist sect of the preacher Fethullah Gülen, whose followers were climbing positions in the judiciary and the police, and organized a trial that jailed hundreds of officers falsely accused of preparing a coup.
Since 2010, Erdogan’s speeches, More and more Islamistsit began to polarize society, alienating the liberal sectors.
radicalization and rupture
The break was consumed in 2013, when an environmental protest in the Gezi Park of Istanbul sparked enormous events throughout the country that led the government on the verge of resignation.
Erdogan has overcome the crisis with police repression protests and by imposing its monolithic authority on the AKP, alienating the most reconciling politicians and breaking with several party co-founders.
“There was a gradual distance of democratic values, with arbitrariness and nepotism in the economic sphere and a populist discourse“, evaluates political scientist Rashit Kaya.
Erdogan’s war to limit the power of his former ally Gülen led to a failed military coup in 2016, attributed to the Gülenist networks In the armed forces, which was followed by a huge purga that landed tens of thousands of judges, police officers and officials accused of having sympathized with the preacher in prison.
a one man regimen
In 2017 Erdogan won with a hasty 51.4% of the vote a referendum to impose a presidential system that abolished the post of prime minister and established what the opposition calls “Regime of a man”.
Already with Erdogan as head of state, the AKP formed an electoral coalition in 2018 with its rival for the conservative vote, the ultra -annualist MHP, in order to keep an absolute majority. In the 2019 municipal elections, he lost the mayors of Ankara and Istanbul.
At the same time, great historical characters of thekp they left the partywhich has been reduced to a device at the service of the president, as reported by several analysts.
The economic debacle
At the same time, The economy has deterioratedwith the lyre down and An inflation shot at 24 years old.
“The AKP has created many political and economic crises, especially in the second half of its government; at the beginning it took measures for democratization and then, with a strong turning point, adopted authoritarian policies”, summarizes political scientists Necmi Erdogan.
So, after 20 years under the AKP, The country is back where it was: with an inflation of 80% and an authoritarian government, now Islamist, that It pursues all the dissident voices.
Erdogan seems determined Keep this dynamic Until the elections of June 2023, in which everything is at stake: if it loses, it will not hold the political charge again; If he wins, he fears the opposition, his will be the only one existing.
Source: Clarin
