The "opposing oneself" stage in power

The AK Parti, founded sixteen and a half years ago, has been in power for fifteen years.

Easier said than done. It is a period approaching nearly one fifth of the total lifespan of the Republic of Turkey. It is the same length as the time of the Republican People's Party under Atatürk's chairmanship. It is three years longer than İnönü's CHP, which continued the single-party chairmanship after that. It is one and a half times the length of the Democrat Party, which came to power by overthrowing the CHP's single-party rule through democratic election, and of course it still has time at least until the 2019 elections.

The AK Parti has broken the records of all the governments that came and went before it, both in terms of its time in power and in terms of the quality and quantity of the work done. In the field of development, it has achieved successes that could not have been imagined or predicted for Turkey before it.

All available figures show that Turkey has grown nearly fourfold during this period.

What has been done is too much for even a brief summary to be listed here. Education, transportation, health, social services and so on.

Despite this, the AK Parti currently has a discourse of change and reform. Moreover, this discourse is accompanied by an interesting self-critical discourse. The criticisms voiced within the party by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan himself, the founder, leader and Chairman of the AK Parti and President, point to the fact that the AK Parti has reached a new stage in which it is, as it were, "in opposition to itself."

As we have said many times before, up to a certain time the AK Parti's strength rested largely on its way of being an opposition in government. Even though it governed alone, there was a deeper layer of power that resisted it on the democratic reforms it wanted to make. The AK Parti achieved its gains in the name of democracy and development by opposing that force which did not want to let go of the status quo, and by waging a tough struggle against it.

While the AK Parti represented the demands and reform motivations that would better suit an opposition, both on the Kurdish question and on democratic freedoms, the main opposition, which also claimed to be on the left, opposed all these democratization processes by deploying every kind of instrument.

If we remember, when the AK Parti was subjected to a closure case as early as 2008, that is, in the seventh year of its coming to power, it barely escaped the opposing deep power achieving the outcome it wanted.

While in power, the AK Parti, with its side that opposed the system, always represented dynamism, change and progress, and made important gains for the country in this direction.

But in the situation we have reached, there is no longer a status quo that we can rail against for the negative things we are living through today.

In the face of any failure, there is no one other than ourselves on whom we can place the responsibility. There is no deep state facing the AK Parti.

Of course there are evil networks that have leaned their backs on the global imperial system, and they too are leaving no stone unturned. But the administration of the state in Turkey is now with the AK Parti, and interestingly there is now a weight created by this, a quite different difficulty.

In the first period of the fifteen years in power, there was a wreckage that could be turned back to and complained about. To be sure, the AK Parti never entered into this rhetoric of wreckage. But today, because of a long period like fifteen years in power, while there is in fact no longer any room for this rhetoric of wreckage, fifteen years is also a time long enough to produce wreckage, and one in which the good work that has been done can make its own standards taken for granted and make the old forgotten.

There is a problem called the "routinization of charisma," and it is largely related to this process. At this stage people lose their consciousness of the cause, forget their mission, neglect the spiritual dimension of the work they do, and plunge into worldly gains.

The one who is best aware of this problem is, again, the leader of this movement, Erdoğan.

The criticisms he has made recently on the occasion of the resignation of some mayors set in motion a dynamism different from the "AK Parti's opposition to itself" type. The leader of a party that has been in power for fifteen years sees that, however much what has been done may count as a revolution by any comparison and in every respect, it is not enough.

Far from being enough, he points out that some things have been done wrongly, and that especially in the field of municipal government, urbanism and social justice, we are far from the level and practices required by the AK Parti's mission.

This is a much harder stage than is supposed. The void created by the absence of a proper opposition facing the AK Parti was filled in the past, in a different way, by the AK Parti itself. Now it is evidently being filled again by the AK Parti. But this time we shall also live through the new and distinctive problems of opposing oneself. The AK Parti will try to surpass itself. But in doing so it will also, in a way, oppose itself by criticizing what it has itself done for fifteen years.

The only problem is that the main opposition, which tries to get the subject of opposition for free on top of the material that the humility the AK Parti will have to display in doing this will produce, will have plenty to jump on.

It seems that this too will have its own separate amusement...