The AK Party's style of politics

We had said, "After 16 April, politics is now a more arduous road."

If truth be told, in essence, that is, when you want to do it justice, politics is difficult and arduous.

Admittedly, if you accept the world as "it has always come this way, it will go on this way," if you do it without clashing with the dominant powers, by complying with their wishes, staying within circles drawn without clashing with their whims and desires, politics is the easiest job.

But this style of politics takes a person out of being a human being. This attitude is presented as an ordinary political practice incompatible with the essence of politics. Its having become ordinary in the name of politics plays a role that distorts the very meaning of politics.

Yet in essence politics requires the demand and the will "to change and to bring about change." One who is content with what happens has no place in politics.

Labor, offered as a practice that accepts what exists as it is, without meddling in anything that matters, means nothing more than being not an actor of politics but its object, its instrument, or being content with serving as its workmanship.

For that reason the history of politics is full of figures who seemed to be great politicians but in fact never aspired to change anything and had no mission other than serving the owners of the status quo. Moreover, politicians who have not shrunk from presenting anew, as a source of respectability in politics, the maintenance of established orders and the continuation, with respect, of all the rote habits. Under so-called appearances of "state seriousness," "impartiality" and "dignified statesmanship," there have been governments that evildoers who gained untouchability have somehow surrounded and seized. The politics of the evil has acquired a strong untouchability and unreachability precisely through the institutionalized political practices produced by those appearances of impartiality and state seriousness. It has reached such a state that for anyone to see as evil a dense evil successively connected to a global network of power and exploitation, to show it even if they see it, to touch it even if they show it, has become the hardest job in the world.

Taking on this difficulty is the job of a real man of a politician. The courage to be able to say that what is being swallowed by us under the appearance of goodness is pure evil, and to be able to struggle against it...

To be able to show that what is presented as beauty is a disgusting ugliness requires insane courage. It requires going against the course of the world.

Going against it inevitably draws upon you the attacks, the mockery, the ridicule, the belittlement of the dominant. The real politician sets out on a path accepting all this, and all of it befalls him. None of the people in history who were able to put forth politics in the real sense has been exempt from these processes. Some succeeded, some did not. In point of fact, not having succeeded, but even being able to put forth this practice of politics is in itself an undertaking.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, at the meeting where his relationship with the AK Parti was revived, spoke of the "AK Parti style of politics." Truly, this style of politics is a style identified precisely with his own person, and speaks precisely of this politics. The problems are many and the greater part of these problems stems from the established network of relations. It is necessary to struggle against this network and to rectify and set right the balance of justice corrupted by this order of relations. This is not an easy job, because the existing order of oppression has also determined all political habits. Even the victims of this order have been exposed to the ideological spell, the influence, of this order. It will be necessary to convince even them.

The ordinary political habit in Turkey until now was oriented toward ensuring the protection of the limits drawn for it. Erdoğan, however, made those limits a subject of debate, and that was not enough, he changed those limits. He always aspired to the difficult, but of course not merely because it was difficult, but because he saw that there was no other way out of the existing vise.

Where he saw the difficult, he never regarded taking his hat and leaving as an option. He chose to stand up to the difficult, to make it give up rather than surrender to it. In all the critical choices he has made throughout his political past there is this risk, this challenge. There were those who invited him to compromise; as they hurled insolent threats about what would befall him otherwise, he risked clashing with blackmailers, political bribe-takers and threatening arrogant powers, and as a result of all this it was always he who won.

It is very clear that he has a will that changes habits, breaks rote patterns, gives new habits and builds a new order. In this way he is walking a road that restores politics "in essence," that is, toward its essential difficulty. Politics is the field that suits human beings best, in which human beings can best realize their human potentials, and he is doing the best of this. He is changing. Despite all contrary suggestions, despite the advice that "this road is risky and unnecessary," so far he has not held back from pursuing the politics and the result he envisioned.

In the process when Abdullah Gül was elected President, despite all the messages expressed by obstacle number 367, which those who regarded themselves as the owners of the system pulled out of the hat last, he did not give up on Gül's election as President, nor afterwards on the arrangement for the President to be elected by the people.

With the "one minute" outburst he hurled in Shimon Peres's face, he made an important breakthrough in Turkey's process of becoming independent in foreign policy.

His anti-interest-rate policy, which at times he had to shoulder alone, had an important effect in the process of becoming independent of the IMF in economic management.

When everyone saw the Gezi incident as a simple sensitivity for trees and tended to read it as a message from the youth, he insisted that there was no message, that the event was plainly a looters' uprising, and he was proven right. His being right was seen better when it was understood that the coup attempt undertaken by FETÖ on 17-25 December was the next plan of the same centers.

He saw what a source of fitna the dershanes and the claim of service behind them were and took the risk of struggling against it. Let us admit that no one other than him could have dared to oppose such an insidious movement, which was receiving support from global powers and had a global organization. He entered this war and saved not only Turkey but the whole Islamic world from this fitna that was also distorting Islam.

With the pioneering, insistent and pursuing stance he displayed in 17-25 December, the Solution Process and its ending, 15 July and most recently the Presidential system, Erdoğan has brought the fine lines of his style of politics into thorough relief.

The concrete manifestation of this politics and its gains for the nation are of course many. The summary: development, democratization and good governance that have taken place in 15 years and directly affected people's lives.

In his own words, there is no place in this style of politics for the facile, cheap attitude of "ten dönüms of melon patch, lie down at your ease, Osman." There is working, striving, challenging if necessary and changing, but above all keeping firm his place in the people's hearts.