Justice and Development Party (Turkey)

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The Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi or AK Parti, or AKP) is the ruling Turkish political party that describes itself as centre-right conservative party.

Brief background

The AKP portrays itself as a moderate, conservative, pro-Western party that advocates a liberal market economy and Turkish membership in the European Union. The party's detractors accuse it of harboring a hidden Islamist agenda due to its deep roots in the religious community and the affiliations of some of its members with banned Islamic parties (RP,FP). The AKP won 46.6% of the popular vote and was allocated 341 seats in the rescheduled 22 July, 2007 elections, a massive increase over the 34% of the vote it received in the 2002 general elections. . Its leader, former Istanbul mayor Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is currently the Prime Minister of Turkey.

History

Erdoğan’s AKP altered the traditional focus of religiously-affiliated politics from concern over Turkey’s lack of Islamic characteristics to pushing for democratic and economic reforms in addition to stressing moral values through the communitarian-liberal consensus. Erdoğan also sought to temper his party’s Islamist image through building a broad-reaching coalition with members of center-right parties, and promising to further Turkey’s push to join the European Union. Erdoğan also positioned the AKP as the opposition party to the old, secular, state-driven development parties that had been proven ineffective by the repeated economic crises of the 1990s and early 2000s.

A faction of moderate conservative members within the old Welfare Party, known as Yenilikçiler, or in English, Reformist formed the Justice and Development Party on August 14, 2001, in an attempt to ground moderate conservative politics in a secular democratic framework. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the leader of the AKP, stated that "AKP is not a political party with a religious axis" when the party was founded.

After some initial stumbling, notably when Erdoğan was temporarily blocked from taking up the Prime Ministership, the AKP has found its feet. It survived the crisis over the 2003 invasion of Iraq despite a massive back bench rebellion where over a hundred AKP MPs joined those of the opposition Republican People's Party in parliament to prevent the government from allowing the United States to launch a Northern offensive in Iraq from Turkish territory.

The AKP has undertaken significant structural reforms and its policy achievements have seen rapid growth and an end to Turkey's three decade long period of hyperinflation—inflation had fallen to 8.8% by June 2004. Influential business publications, the Economist and the Financial Times, consider the AK Party's government the most successful in Turkey in decades.

In the local elections of 2004, the AKP won an unprecedented 42% of the valid votes making inroads against the secular nationalist Republican People's Party (CHP) on the South and West Coasts, and against Social Democratic People's Party (Turkey) which is supported by some Kurds in the Southeast of Turkey.

In January 2005, the AKP was admitted as an observer member in the European People's Party (EPP), the conservative party of the EU. It is likely to become a full member of the EPP if Turkey is admitted to the EU. If the EU eventually rejects Turkey for membership, however, many fear that the AKP could again split between its reformist and conservative factions, heralding another period of instability in Turkish politics.

2007 General elections

The AKP achieved a landslide victory in the rescheduled July 22 2007 elections with 46.6% of the vote, translating into control of 341 of the 550 available parliamentary seats. Although the AKP received significantly more votes in 2007 than in 2002, the number of parliamentary seats they controlled decreased due to the rules of the Turkish electoral system. However, they retain a comfortable ruling majority.

Territorially, the elections of 2007 saw a major advance for the AKP, with the party outpolling the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party in traditional Kurdish strongholds such as Van and Mardin, as well as outpolling the secular-left CHP in traditionally secular areas such as Antalya and Artvin. Overall, the AKP secured a plurality of votes in 68 of Turkey's 81 provinces, with its strongest vote of 71% coming from Bingöl. Its weakest vote, a mere 12%, came from Tunceli, the only Turkish province where the Alevi sect form a majority.

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