The crossroads the AK Party has reached after 23 years

Today is 14 August, the 23rd anniversary of the founding of the AK Party. The AK Party was founded in a period when the 28 February process was being lived with all its arrogance, its disdain and its aggression, and when an insolence that this process would last 1000 years could be expressed with ease by the bosses of this process.

In fact, it was founded after the closure of the Virtue Party, which had been founded after the Welfare Party was closed as a result of this process. Its founder, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was banned from politics owing to a conviction he received on the pretext of a poem he had read, and the majority were those who thought that the life of this party too could not be very long because of the still-valid threats of 28 February.

So much time has passed that these things can now be read as history. Those born in the year the party was founded reached voting age three years ago. They do not remember what came before, and 23 years have passed in which time has flowed much faster than in the past because of the extremely rapid change being lived.

The 28 February order in force when the party was founded was in fact nothing but an effort to restore a secularist authoritarianism that had been continuing for 80 years. It was the desperate efforts of an order established 80 years earlier to reproduce itself, even to stay on its feet, against a changing sociology. The arrogance of acting for the people in spite of the people also contained deep ignorance and ideological bigotry. The country governed with this ideological bigotry was in a serious ideological, political, social and administrative crisis in every respect. Those who had made a habit of staging coups on ideological pretexts had nothing to give the country but corruption, bad governance, injustice and restrictions.

The open state of crisis the country was in provided an important opportunity for the AK Party to emerge. The cadres who founded the AK Party stood out with a new leadership, ideological motivation and projects that could come out of this crisis. The people, fed up with the ideological bigotry and the administrative incompetence of the 28 February adherents, clearly saw in this new cadre a possibility of representation for themselves and, only 15 months after its founding, brought the AK Party to power on its own.

The AK Party found and offered very strong solutions to the crisis the country was in, such that the Turkish people renewed its trust in it in election after election. So much so that it gave it an authority, power and duration that has fallen to no one in the history of democracy. Meanwhile, in the early period the AK Party, like an opposition in power, in spite of the ruling elites and their deep states, carried out the most effective and most successful reforms and projects in the country's history.

Distance from the ruling elites, tensions with them, made the AK Party and its cadres closer to the people. Thanks to this, the country was renewed, as it were, from top to bottom, both in the field of development and in terms of the state-nation relationship. Very great works were done and systems were built in health, housing, transportation, education, urbanization, the defense industry and production. These systems changed the whole air, atmosphere and life habitus of the country from top to bottom. In essence, we are today living in a Turkey completely different from the situation in which the AK Party took over power.

However, the length of the 23-year period in power also constitutes one of the AK Party's greatest weaknesses today. During this period many things, positive or negative, good or bad, were lived in Turkey. All that was lived also constituted a test for the AK Party. The AK Party, as a whole or in terms of its adherents, successfully passed some of these tests, while some wore it down as they passed.

The last few elections have provided sufficient data on what kind of wearing down the AK Party has gone through during its time in power. The party's founding leader and chairman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, on the occasion of his assessment of the latest election results, laid out this data in detail. He in fact set out a significant part of the diagnosis, but a treatment program has not yet been implemented. Today the AK Party is at a serious crossroads. Will the party, which was able to make the country experience revolutionary reforms in every field, be able or unable to show a will or competence that will carry the country into the future in accordance with its own philosophy? If it can show a will, it needs to diagnose its present weaknesses on the spot without any complex and set about treating them courageously.

Today a significant part of the crisis situations in which the AK Party found the country 23 years ago has repeated itself, updated, in new conditions, and has settled at the top of the list of the AK Party's greatest problems.

In health, for example, where the AK Party has been most successful. The AK Party built a health infrastructure that can be ambitious not only in Turkey's history but in the whole world. At the start it also built a very well-functioning system together with this infrastructure. But in the following times a state of systemlessness, not commensurate with all this strong infrastructure and the crowded army of health workers, began to show itself. Today field data collected from patients applying to the health system show that there is a serious disruption and resulting dissatisfaction, but a lack of a mechanism by which this data would be sufficiently evaluated and the system updated is also felt. So much so that in the last elections the area the AK Party counted as its greatest asset could suddenly become its weakest area.

Of course, more important is the field of education. With the number of universities reaching 208, Turkey has been made a complete country of universities. This was in fact something that could not even be imagined, but this speed of universitization also led to very deep changes in the sociology of society, and these were not observed and foreseen in time. At the end of all the education policies that the AK Party governments undertook with development as the priority, serious consequences emerged in which the family, working life and spiritual culture were greatly affected. The diagnosis and treatment of these too will require very serious sociological research and courageous policies. Our basic education system is still excessively ideological and mythological. The minds of the students who pass through this education system are still shaped by an ideological-mythological understanding that rests on no valid scientific, historical or religious reference. It is in fact a miracle even for them to pull themselves together from this hour on, but in our age, in which access to every kind of document and information has become possible, the distances between the official ideology and the facts continue to constitute an important sore point in our education system.

In the field of bureaucracy. The AK Party's most important claim and achievement from the start was having put forth a more effective practice of political governance against the bureaucracy. The performance shown in the field of development over 23 years was possible thanks to this. But in the situation reached, the bureaucracy appears, as it has often done in its own history and in accordance with its own nature, to have gradually taken the reins into its hands. The bureaucratic culture appears to have returned to its negative role as a factor that makes investments, initiatives, even the citizen's daily life, difficult.

In the field of justice. The field in which the AK Party is most ambitious and always must be is justice. No little distance has been covered in this, but just as in the bureaucracy, because of the delays, convoluted ways and mechanisms in the judicial bureaucracy, justice has become one of the greatest weaknesses of the AK Party government. The establishment of an impartial justice mechanism, whose objectivity can be observed even when it is against us, is in essence also the most important ideal of a Muslim politics. For this field to be studied anew, sufficient surveys, face-to-face interviews and field studies need to be conducted among people whose business has fallen to the judiciary.

Thus, with the data to be collected from the field, there is no remedy but to cling again to the reasons that kept the AK Party in power alone for 22 years.

Of course, how far the AK Party will remain attached to its roots, of the nature of a raison d'être coming from history, and how far it can carry out its mission arising from this, and how much, apart from Erdoğan, the existing party cadres have an understanding and intention to carry this mission, is also a question to be dwelt on.