"Justice" and "Development" after 15 years

Yesterday was the 15th anniversary of the 3 November 2002 elections, which determined the AK Parti's coming to power by opening a new page in Turkey's history. That is, as of today the AK Parti government has completed 15 years.

We have a good opportunity or occasion to make, more coolly, an accounting of what in this period was wanted to be done and was done and what could not be done, and of what was not wanted to be done yet was done, whether through its own neglect or mistakes or because of factors it was exposed to. We will continue making this accounting, which we began some time ago.

In its founding, by raising the slogans of "justice" and "development," the AK Parti promised, with the name it chose, that it would act on the basis of these two principles.

In fact, in the world we live in, for a country like Turkey these two concepts are the two most important tasks a political movement must cope with.

When you focus on these two tasks, you undertake a job that touches and encompasses the lives of people of every age, every sex, every class and every ethnic, religious or philosophical origin.

The handicap of development policies in the modern world and in Turkey's recent past is that you cannot carry them out without compromising on justice. Development policies proceed with models that open the way further for capitalism's greedy ambitions and make social stratification more impermeable. And it is also a widespread observation and opinion that the neo-liberal mission, which was easily pinned on the AK Parti because of the policies it took on in the early period, deepens social injustice much further and harbors a radical contradiction to the understanding of the social state.

This is, in my view, the field in which the AK Parti showed its greatest difference: it carried out strong development policies in a way that corrected the ground of social justice and strengthened it much further.

The revolutionary infrastructure investments and the policies applied in health, education, transportation, housing and agriculture spread social welfare down to the lowest stratum. While raising the per capita GNP from the 3000 dollar level to the 11 thousand dollar level by May 2013, it also ensured that this average output was reflected in the lives of people from every segment of the country. That the gap between the health service reaching the lowest-stratum person living in the remotest corner of Anatolia and the health service received by the highest-stratum people living in the most developed districts of Istanbul or Ankara has closed completely could not even be imagined; today it is a reality. In 2002 in Turkey the number of people living below the hunger line of 4 dollars a day made up 32 percent of society. Today this figure has reached zero. This alone is enough to show the success of the social justice policies carried out alongside development policies.

The weight the AK Parti gave to social services and policies while on one hand making room for neo-liberal policies actually shows that it cannot easily be fitted into a neo-liberal category. Frankly, in terms of the economic policies the world has registered today, it must first be accepted that the path the AK Parti followed is a very distinctive one.

In the development policies pursued, while the gains of investors were looked after, it was also looked after that people from the economically lower segments would certainly benefit from the same gains. One can see this in health, in transportation, and in housing.

As an example, housing policies are, on the other hand, one of the fields in which the AK Parti has ultimately been most criticized. The expression "TOKİ housing," which has become a byword today, can be regarded as a sign of a discontent in this field. The criticisms that the housing produced in cities has a side that gives the cities no character and condemns people to a monotonous living space are to some extent justified, but nobody wants to remember from which problem context this housing administration set out and, as a result, nobody wants to see the contribution it has made to social justice.

The housing field is perhaps one of the most important fields in which a contribution to social justice can be made together with development, and the AK Parti did this. With the housing mass-produced by TOKİ, it first of all produced an alternative to the squatter housing and to much lower-quality, infrastructure-less and distorted, and to the same degree expensive, housing. Thanks to this alternative, a segment that would never have owned a home in its life both became homeowners and had its lifestyle changed through these homes. So to speak, through TOKİ, the people in the 32 percent bracket moved quickly into the middle class. That is, the problem or goal that TOKİ was trying to overcome in its early days was not to produce ideal housing adapted to our civilization, our culture, and ideal and long-term city plans. On the contrary, it was to produce housing for masses longing for a reasonable home in which to put their heads, and it did this. The people with low incomes who became homeowners very easily thanks to TOKİ also made these homes a step toward a better life.

Thanks to this housing policy, on one hand the construction sector and all the side sectors began to experience tremendous dynamism within a short time. While the housing standard set out led people who had seen the middle class before to seek housing of better quality than TOKİ, they also took the bar set by TOKİ as a reference. Thus TOKİ also made a considerable contribution during this period to overall housing quality.

At the end of 15 years, of course, we do not like the housing that TOKİ produced to meet an urgent social need when it set out.

Society wants much better, because it now has the power to want it, and the government needs to see this and respond to it with new policies.