Erdogan’s WaySeptember/October 2019 29
attributed to Aristotle, “Plato is my
friend, but truth is a better friend.”)
The vehicle for Erdogan’s ambitions
was the Justice and Development
Party—known by its Turkish abbrevia-
tion, ¬¶—which he formed in 2001. At
a press conference announcing the new
party, Erdogan listed democratization
and pluralism as its ideological corner-
stones. His movement, he claimed, was
based on power sharing: “A cadre will
run the party, and decisions won’t be
taken under the shadow o one leader.”
He described his own role as an “or-
chestra chief,” proclaiming that the “age
o me-centered politics is over.” Erdo-
gan founded the ¦ with two other
veterans o the Welfare Party, Abdullah
Gul and Bulent Arinc, and the troika
had charisma, support from Turkey’s
Anatolian heartland, and a novel idea:
that European integration and the
protections o religious freedom oered
by the ¤ were good for the pious and
that democratization was in the interest
o conservative Turks. “We used to see
the Turkish state as a leviathan that
oppressed the religious and the poor,”
Arinc recalled. “Now, the ¤ negotia-
tion process convinced us the Turkish
state can be democratized.” Erdogan
also noted that because o the undemo-
cratic nature o the Turkish establish-
ment, his “conservative democratic”
party could be considered “antiestab-
lishment” without calling itsel an
Islamist party, reaping the bene¿ts o
outsider status while maintaining wide
appeal. It would become a winning
formula for years to come.
The ¬¶ won Turkey’s 2002 elections
with 34 percent o the vote; the runner-up
received 19 percent. Earlier conservative
parties had also won landslides—thedon’t need bearded men who are good
Koran reciters; we need people who do
their job properly,” Erdogan would later
say. As part o this drive, Erdogan
established a network o volunteers who
could put tens o thousands o party
posters on walls in a few hours and
distribute handouts to voters during
morning commutes. These were his
“nerve ends,” he said, capable o send-
ing signals from the Welfare Party’s
administration to voters. Erdogan also
used another analogy to describe his
organization: a “brick wall,” carefully
laid and dicult to break.
These grass-roots eorts paid o in
1994, when Erdogan was elected Istanbul’s
mayor. He made public transportation
free o charge during Islamic holidays,
banned alcohol in municipal facilities,
and lifted employment restrictions on
women who wore headscarves. When a
reporter asked him to explain his success,
he replied, “I am Istanbul’s imam.”
Erdogan’s bravado alarmed secularists
and generals, and his rising career was
soon endangered: in 1998, Turkey’s
highest court shut down the Welfare
Party, and after a ¿ery speech at a rally,
Erdogan was charged with inciting hatred
and sentenced to ten months in prison.
The legal stain, which the judiciary
planned as a way to terminate his career,
maximized Erdogan’s popularity, since
pious Turks now viewed him as their
voice, which the state wanted to silence.
By the time he left prison, Erdogan was
ready to take the path to power.
It was then that Erdogan moved
from local to national politics, defying
the ban on his political activities and
leading a breakaway group from Er-
bakan’s party. (He explained the rift
with his mentor by repeating a maxim