19 years from opposition in power to global opposition

Yesterday the 19th anniversary of the AK Party's founding was marked with the coronavirus epidemic measures observed. In fact the event took place less as a celebration than as a remembrance, a balance sheet, a commemorative gathering. The speech of Chairman Mr. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, which laid out the accounting of these 19 years for himself, for party members and for the whole of Turkey, was highly comprehensive and at the same time a framework that very clearly showed the meaning of the stage we have reached today, 19 years later.

We know that the AK Party was not in power until 2010, that is, until the 12 September Constitutional Amendment Referendum, and that it even played the role of an opposition in power. This was in fact what gave it its real strength. In Turkey there was a powerful stratum that had once, through negligence, let the government slip to the people but had sworn never to let the state slip, a stratum distant from the people, alien to the people's values, which looked at the country almost like an occupier.

In the first half of its 18 years in power, the AK Party fought this stratum fiercely and pushed it back to a certain point. It is still in memory how those who today take the officious liberty of writing the AK Party a democracy report card took part, even while the AK Party was in power, in the inhuman treatment inflicted on themselves.

Now they try to make those old days forgotten by trying to appear quite democratic, but how could one forget? Until as late as 2011, an Imam-Hatip graduate student was being deprived of the most basic right to education through the senseless coefficient practice and the headscarf ban, and the spouses of the country's President, Speaker of Parliament and Prime Minister were not admitted to the state protocol. A closure case was opened against the country's largest party because of the efforts it put forth in the name of correcting these wrongs; in fact, in this way it was being attempted to make it kneel before the "real power" in every matter.

All of this was happening before the eyes of the people. The AK Party was the opposition in power. Nor did it kneel to those who saw themselves as the real power. This resistance it displayed against these arrogant ones, together with the extraordinarily good performance it showed in development and services, made it the people's favorite. Taking the strength of the people behind it, after a while it pushed that power well back and brought it to a reasonable line.

But there was another structure, nestled inside the state, that lay in wait, prepared, for this change of power and tried to appropriate it. FETÖ, which for years criticized the deep state while organizing itself as a deep state, would in fact show that the sense of power the AK Party lived with for a while longer was an illusion. This structure saw, like all the other parties, the AK Party as transient and itself as a permanent actor, and it was a plague that had beset not only the AK Party but the whole country, even the whole Islamic world. The open struggle launched on that front from 2013 turned into a struggle for salvation with 15 July. Today FETÖ is undoubtedly still active on many fronts, still trying to run its intrigues and schemes, but in Turkey it no longer has even the smallest share of power. Vigilance is of course essential.

So, in this equation of power and opposition for the AK Party, can we say that, having recently become thoroughly the government, it has in the eyes of the public moved completely away from the missions that opposition represents?

Undoubtedly, today within the country the matter has ceased to be one of government and opposition. The AK Party is in power in the country and lives its disadvantages as much as its advantages. As the ruling party, it is still the pursuer and implementer of great projects that will benefit the country, and in this it has no rival. It has brought the country to an indisputable level on the point of democratization. It must also not be overlooked that each of those who debate this subject can do so with ease, in the end, on a ground that the AK Party has made valid and possible. In the last local elections, by losing the municipalities of the three large cities to the opposition, it has proved the level of democracy, even if unintentionally, in this way. This was of course not very good for the country, especially for Istanbul, but in many places it was a development that struck like a slap in the face of those who opened Erdoğan's democratic credentials to debate.

Meanwhile, even if we are on a ground where the language of the opposition in power has perhaps become meaningless within Turkey, the second period of the AK Party administration was defined by opposing the global power operating against Turkey. From the One Minute outburst in Davos to the Mavi Marmara, the Arab Spring, Somalia, Syria, Kashmir, Myanmar, Libya and now the Mediterranean, it was a struggle we have had to wage. In this struggle the same countries, the same coalition of centers, always confronted us.

Before these centers, which regard themselves as the deep forces of the world order and impose their most unjust, most wrongful decisions on the world, Turkey is always the opposition, but an opposition that, one way or another, has so far tried to do what it says.

These colonial powers of the world are so openly in the wrong that, as Turkey's voice has been raised, it has become a hope among oppressed peoples of the world. An expectation has formed that where Turkey exists, oppression will not continue and will in the end vanish. This gives the AK Party the opportunity to voice, on a global scale and in a stronger and more rightful form, the language of opposition that it no longer uses within the country.

The intent of these centers is Turkey. They tried to prevent the Arab Spring with coups. By establishing a permanent order of chaos in Syria, they tried to block Turkey's openings. On our border, the USA itself is trying to have a state built for the PKK terrorist organization with financial, military and logistical support. What has happened in Libya and the Mediterranean is quite current. Although in all of them Turkey's rightness is in fact indisputable, there is a judgmental power discourse that deems Turkey aggressive for defending itself and accuses it of incompatibility with NATO and the EU.

This is the real test. Who stands where emerges at this point. Leaving aside some developments inside Turkey, who stands where in the face of this global power?

Here the AK Party is again in opposition, representing the rightful and the oppressed, while yesterday's powerful, today's democracy smurfs are, without fail, everywhere on the side of the unjust global power.