The Turkish AK Party and its Leader

Umit Cizre, Umit Cizre

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317265047
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Políticas de Oriente Medio

After landslide electoral victories, two referenda and a presidential election, thirteen years of AK Party rule have shattered many myths regarding Turkey's politics and the nature of the party itself.

This book argues that the last thirteen years are best understood via the AK party's interaction with the social-political realm. It focuses on criticism, dissent and opposition from prominent organized groups in Turkish society, which themselves represent significantly different traditions, ideologies and interests. Bringing together specialists from across the field, its chapters explore key societal actors to reveal the dynamics behind the last decade of AK Party rule. Overall, the book throws light on the extent to which the government's characters, trajectories, policies and leadership style have been interactively shaped by opposition and dissent.

Exploring the historically unprecedented and politically controversial rule of the AK Party, as well as the relationship between modern societal groups and a government driven by a conservative Islamic tradition, this book is a valuable resource for students and scholars of Turkish studies, as well as politics more generally.

1 Introduction^*

The politics of redressing grievances—the AK Party and its leader

Ümit Cizre

DOI: 10.4324/9781315636443-1

After six landslide victories in local and national elections, plus two referenda and a presidential election, the AK Party (Turkish acronym of the Justice and Development Party) has shattered many commonly held beliefs regarding what was formerly viewed as a quintessentially Islamic and conservative political force. Then came the June 7, 2015 parliamentary elections whose results interrupted the seemingly inexorable thirteen-year rise of its leader-as-party, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. To understand the thirteen years of the AK Party in office, it is imperative to identify the defining characteristics and facts about the past story of the party and the leader. This retrospective analysis may help to comprehend the implications of the past which seems to have culminated in a milestone election “defeat” in 2015.

The central myth the party has punctured is the popular perception that Islamic or Islam-friendly movements are overly focused on belief-based moral issues and they do not follow global models of governance, which they scorn as “Western.” This is a view that stems from the experience of the AK Party’s predecessor, the Welfare Party (the Refah Party) (1983–98) which led a coalition government between 1996–97 until it was forced to resign by the secular establishment led by the high command, bureaucracy, media and judiciary.

However, in reality, the popularity the AK Party enjoyed has largely been attributed to its concern for governance issues, a working market economy, formulation of public policies centered around reforming old practices and implementing new agendas. As they were able to operate as truly “governing” party governments dealing with concrete public issues without being overly worried about “regime issues,” AK Party governments illustrate the example of a political party that could adopt higher ambitions beyond obsession with Islam and that are fully in line with the modern capitalist world although coming from an Islamic lineage. More significantly perhaps, it shows the apex of the secular regime’s long process of integrating, sometimes negotiating, and often “co-opting” Islamic/conservative movements while keeping constitutional, legal and moral restraints on them intact. Moreover, drawing support from center-right and left voters, the party leader’s authority and appeal has depended not just on capturing the arithmetic majority but also on captivating the center ground of Turkish politics. In this sense, the AK Party can also be said to have easily broken another myth that Islam-sensitive political positions are part of the “radical right” as opposed to the more respectful centrist and more moderate political positions and discourses.

It follows that AK Party governments produced their own reality, which challenged the grandest myth of the republic, the secular–Islamist divide. The conventional view about the AK Party can be reduced to two bare essentials: the first is the presumed link between the character of the ruling party and its predecessor, the Refah Party, in terms of both being “Islamic,” the term Islamic being defined in an essentialist manner. The second is the perception that the AK Party is the product of a time-tested conflict with the secular bloc. As a result, in the picture drawn by the orthodox analyses, the party only engages with a conservative-religious majority while harboring no affinity or sympathy for the secular, capitalist/affluent, liberal, urban lifestyle of the vast majority of Turks. However, what is missing in these accounts is the fact that permeation of global capitalism into societal mores in the last thirteen years has created a flood of changes in cultural, personal and family relations and a new balance of choices for Muslims regarding lifestyles and politics. Through the demonstration effect of conservative Muslims being transformed into dominant politicians and good capitalists with secular-like lifestyles while keeping their family values, cultural norms and religious beliefs intact, there has been a visible ascendancy of conservative values in the country parallel to a secularization tendency experienced by Muslims. This is not a truly paradoxical development. What needs to be acknowledged here is that the historically abused and misused secular–Islamist divide has been compromised and challenged by the emergence of a complex new synthesis between a secular modernizing lifestyle and a giant grass-roots movement putting Islam-derived values at the core of its political representation.

“Politics of redressing” as a new genre of politics

In light of the above myths undermined by AK Party administrations, is there anything original or unpredicted about the travails of the AK Party? The answer is a qualified “yes” if the ruling party is measured against the imagery of a home-grown and more overtly “Islamist” party, the predecessor Refah Party, whose legacy is repudiated by the AK Party. There are a number of good reasons for declining to reclaim the Refah’s legacy: the Refah Party went into history as failing to achieve anything much except a penchant for double-talk, empty mandates and a radical Islamic vocabulary which have all left a bitter taste even among its followers so as to set the tone for the “newness” of the AK Party’s project.

The “newness,” however, has been about a single-minded focus on “performance” as affirmation of the “effectiveness” (which turned out to be the most crucial aspect) of the AK Party as the political agency to restore identity, dignity and standing to Turkey’s conservative sections of population who were failed twice: first, by the secular state’s exclusionary policies and then by the recklessness of the Refah Party, whose brief tenure in power was terminated by military intervention in 1997. The AK party certainly represents a “new genre of politics” in Turkey in a specific sense: it has succeeded in exalting to a respectful level the category of those who “suffered” at the hands of the secular regime by being kept out of the central decision-making processes. The party’s efforts to redress these wrongs have resulted in raising its constituents to respectable middle classes.

But the AK Party’s success in this regard did not inject a craving for universal democratic rights and norms into the bloodstream of Turkey’s Islam-sensitive sectors. What the politics of redressing has resulted in is the delivery of “affluence and prosperity” via sustained growth in an unfettered market economy, not the universal democratic norms and rights which the European Union (EU) reform process was all about.

More significantly, the new genre of politics, that is, the politics of redress, has bifurcated the political field into “victims” of the past system and everyone else, making it necessary to erect barricades to guard the interests of the new pious middle classes. This genre of politics, in other words, has reproduced the existential divide of the Ottoman-Turkish polity between secular and Islamic sectors in a different modality but with even more segregation, animosity and anxiety between them. It can be further argued that since Erdoğan himself was not committed to those rights and norms, the politics of redress produced further opportunities for the AK Party’s leader in his quest for power.

On the other hand, this is not to say that there has not been some room for inventiveness in governance; some form of semi-intellectual engagement with the supporters of democratization; and a democratic-like sensibility at moments of commitment to executing reforms to fulfill the conditions for being a full member of the EU. The party certainly challenged, exposed and weakened the ideological foundations of the regime, the cornerstone of its triumphant moments including the dismantling or reshaping the role of traditional power centers. These centers represent the institutional leadership of the republican Kemalist ideology, namely the higher administrative courts, the Armed Forces, universities, civil bureaucracy and media. It is fair to say that AK Party governments have managed to undermine and disorient the establishment, in particular the military – arresting 10 percent of the generals as part of investigations of coup plots against the government – shaking it profoundly if not necessarily terminating its ethos. Regarding foreign policy, the AK Party governments and the party leader can also be credited for turning Turkey into a model in the region, if not at the time of this writing in the Fall of 2015, at least during their early years. Friendly to Islam but not identifiable with Jihadist militancy, using an Islamic lexicon and drawing on ideas of Ottoman revival, Erdoğan spoke of restoring dignity and confidence not just to Turkey’s Muslims but also to the long-suffering Muslims of the entire Middle East. Since the 2011 Arab uprisings, however, Turkey has advanced no meaningful or credible ideas for solving the problems of the region, and so the country’s stature has fallen.

It is widely accepted that upholding a conservative socio-cultural spirit and an unbridled market agenda, AK Party governments, under the political leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, currently the president of the republic, have indeed had a positive track record for making amends for the grievances of their followers: a soundly managed economy delivered jobs, housing, education, health care and rising living standards. Although basically following the same free market policies started by Kemal Dervis, the minister responsible for the economy in 2001, AK Party governments went further in terms of including more market-friendly technocrats like Ali Babacan in the cabinet and bureaucracy, privatizing more sectors, as well as generating more growth and higher income for all. Until the government launched a massive military offensive against the terrorist militant nationalist group, Kurdistan Workers’ Party (the Turkish acronym being the PKK) after the June 7 elections in 2015, AK Party governments had made some milestone decisions like opening a peace process for the intractable Kurdish question, which had offered the best hope for a way out of the impasse for several generations of Turks.

Society’s immersion in global patterns of consumerism and a massive generation of capital and investment took the edge off the battle with the secular camp. So much so that by 2010, even the secular opposition came to admit grudgingly the AK Party’s modicum of success in managing the economy.

Reinforcing the basic flaws of the system

The history of AK Party governments’ thirteen years, however, will also be remembered as reinforcing the basic flaws of the regime, if not introducing new ones; exploiting the old regime’s contradictions; undercutting or self-canceling their own democratic reforms in compliance with the EU accession process; and showing their own penchant for paradox. Essentially, the post-EU reform process remained reluctant, tenuous and partial, continuing to feed on and strengthen the dysfunctions of the existing system.

A perfect example is the present position of the president reneging on, after defending, the investigations, trials and convictions of a network of secular and ultra-nationalist military officers and civilian accomplices accused of planning coups against the AK Party governments beginning in 2003 (called the Ergenekon and Sledgehammer [Balyoz] trials). In what many described as the “trials of the century,” generals, former force commanders and even a former chief of staff were given heavy sentences although the Constitutional Court overrode the verdicts which led to the release of almost all the defendants between 2014 and 2015. Erdoğan’s statement in March 2015 that: “I never approved of the arrest of our commanders including our former chief of General Staff [Gen. İlker Başbuğ] whom I worked with,” matches the technical definition of “retraction,” as the then Prime Minister Erdoğan on various occasions expressed strong support for the trials as reaffirming his determination to prove the supremacy of elected civilians.

It is also true that the changing rhetoric of Erdoğan is motivated by his recrimination after the bitter fallout with the influential religious group called the Gülen movement (led by a conservative clergyman Fethullan Gülen) whose supporters are believed to have facilitated the trials by exposing the coup planners. Kim Shively, in her contribution to this volume, argues that the Gülen movement’s general support for the AK Party in the past and its eventual rupture later represents a testimony to the pragmatism of the movement’s politics rather than any “wedding” and “divorce” between Erdoğan and Gülen and their respective followers (see Chapter 8).

However, for Turkey’s believers in genuine democracy, the trials had sent an unequivocal message about the unacceptability of coup making as part of the future role of the Turkish Army. As such, the president’s disowning of his engagement with the trials has shattered hopes that establishing democratic civilian controls over the military could serve as the premise for a new program for a new Turkey that would qualify to join the European Union. On the contrary, it seemed as if the party, in aligning itself with a politically alert military, had come full circle and reinvigorated the traditional dogmas of the Kemalist regime.

Periodization of the AK Party's travails

There is a pervasive acknowledgment that the travails of the AK Party governments can be viewed in two distinct phases, before and after the 2011 elections, as two complementary (for some) and conflicting (for others) projects.

The first stage

In the first phase, granted that the EU-oriented, rights-based reforms by the government did not originate from a genuine engagement with democracy but from having to address a relentlessly aggressive and potentially hostile secular establishment that had treated the party with contempt and disdain, the AK Party governments upended the old politics, curbing its authoritarian mentality and reducing the role of extra-political institutions like big business, the military, the judiciary and the civilian bureaucracy as part of EU-driven reforms. Ironically, however, the government’s adoption of a democratic reform discourse after the November 2002 elections unleashed the most intense fears and insecurities on the part of Kemalists, women, non-Muslim, non-Sunni and non-Turkish minorities, big business, socialists and liberals. The European-friendly reform promises were viewed as disguising the party’s intentions to dismantle the key premises undergirding the “modern” and “secular” Turkish state.

It is only in the second phase, that is, after the 2011 election victory that the party demonstrated blatantly its capacity for reform and then, in contrast, to recreate the repressive state culture and institutions. Sinan Ciddi, in his contribution, examines the critiques of the AK Party presented by wider societal advocates of secular and modernizing foundational ideology of Kemalism other than the Republican People’s Party (Turkish acronym CHP), the torchbearer of the secular ideology and the military. Neo-Kemalist circles are convinced that the gains of the Kemalist revolution including secularism are under threat from the AK Party rule, which is thought to represent continuity with the Refah Party and the movement it came from, namely, the ‘National Outlook’ movement, initiated by Necmettin Erbakan. This neo-Kemalist sense of “threat” carries a strong sense of conspiracy in the way that the AK Party’s rise is perceived as a project by the imperialist nations—particularly the United States—to divide and ultimately dismember Turkey. Ciddi problematizes the neo-Kemalist idea of “the battle for survival” which leads to insistence on perceiving social issues in binary terms, demarcated by forces of the “good” against the forces of “evil.” He also argues that the leitmotif offered by advocates of neo-Kemalism helps to foster and perpetuate a societal climate of polarization, engendering fear and reinforcing individuals’ biases toward others (see Chapter 2).

Nil Mutluer’s contribution investigates the varying impact of the outlook and policies of the ruling party on Kemalist feminists who range from conservative to reformist groups depending on how they interpret the principles and reforms of Atatürk. The AK Party governments led conservative Kemalist feminists to embrace “the arguments of first- and second-generation feminists in the women’s movement of Turkey in the post-1980s with regard to equal citizenship, family, violence, and sexuality” while reformist Kemalist feminists found “the opportunity to convey their messages to their conservative counterparts with more dedication” (see Chapter 3).

The battle lines in the reform-friendly first stage were drawn between a simplified dichotomy of “nervous modernists” as they called themselves, and so-called Islamists, the latter pole conjuring up in the minds of the former, imageries of a religious, unenlightened, un-emancipated, primitive and masculine bloc of people huddling together. Apart from the consumerist craze which created a commonality between the so-called secular and Islamist camps, like all simplified categorizations, this cleavage has disguised the dialectical relations between the two sides which would soon re-emerge in the second phase especially by the AK Party’s move to the nationalist, statist and security-driven priorities which sidelined an “individual rights-based” discourse.

In hindsight, the liberal, democratic and statist-secular critiques of Erdoğan and the AK Party tended...