Rise of the Justice and Development Party
DOCUMENT IN CONTEXT
Despite numerous crises and repeated interventions by the military, Turkey’s political
system remained fairly stable for the five decades after the introduction of multiparty
elections in 1950. Political parties came and went over the years, and the generals
ousted governments of which they disapproved, but some of the same leaders returned
to office repeatedly. Government policies varied only by a matter of degree.
A harbinger of chance arrived in 1995–97, when the Welfare Party, an Islamic-
oriented party, won a plurality of seats in parliamentary elections and formed a coali-
tion government. This was the first major break with the secular politics mandated for
Turkey by its founder, Mustafa Kemal (or Ataturk). The Welfare-led government
lasted less than a year before the military—having declared itself the guarantor of
Ataturk’s legacy—pressured it to resign, leading to a series of weak governments led
by the traditional parties.
Another turning point of more enduring significance occurred in the 2002 elec-
tions. As Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit’s health failed him, Turkey’s traditional par-
ties on the left and the right proved themselves unable to assuage growing public dis-
satisfaction with a sagging economy. Into this vacuum stepped Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
a charismatic politician able to generate enthusiasm across the political spectrum. Erdo-
gan, a former mayor of Istanbul, headed the Justice and Development Party (AKP), a
successor to the ousted and disbanded Welfare Party. Erdogan was himself ineligible
to run for election in 2002 because of a criminal conviction for “religious incitement”
stemming from his publicly reading a poem that the authorities considered to be
overtly Islamic.
The AKP scored an astonishing victory in the elections held on November 3,
2002, winning 34 percent of the vote, enough to give it an overwhelming majority of
seats in the Grand National Assembly. The AKP thus became the first party in nearly
fifteen years to win an outright majority in parliament. The traditional parties that in
various guises had governed Turkey in recent decades all failed to obtain the 10 per-
cent of the vote necessary to acquire seats in the legislature. The only other party to
win seats was a revamped Republican People’s Party, Ataturk’s old ruling party, which
had not held power by itself since its ouster in the landmark elections of 1950.
Immediately after the election, Erdogan and the AKP moved to dispel fears that
they intended to transform Turkey into an Islamist state. In a program published on
November 23—five days after the new government took office—the AKP pledged to
respect the country’s tradition of secularism as well as freedom of religion. The party
also said it would govern responsibly and would cooperate with other segments of soci-
ety. “We will respect pluralistic democracy, human rights and the supremacy of law
and we will do our best to achieve social consensus when tackling with important
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