Beginning with the general elections held in November 2002, Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has succeeded in winning first place in every election since the party's establishment. Yet, the recent municipal elections in March reveal more than just voting patterns, electoral statistics, and distribution of local government seats. The results show that AKP emerged as the leading party again, but with a major recession in its votes in comparison to the last general election in July 2007. As was expected, the cabinet was later revised in light of the election results by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and the visage of the council of ministers was refreshed with a fresh shade of ‘green' make up. Nascent signs of the transformation in AKP's political discourse were visible just before the last elections and have become clearer since the March vote. In a move that symbolizes the first major revision of the party's discourse ever since it parted paths with the political Islamist tradition in Turkey, the current shift is taking the party back to the very roots of its origins, to the discourse of the ‘National View' ideology (Milli Görüş, MG).

The Political Islamist Tradition in Turkey

AKP's establishment in Turkey's political landscape goes back to the events surrounding the landmark 28 February 1997 period, or the post modern coup as it has become popularly named. The government led by the Islamist Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, RP) in coalition with the centre-right True Path Party (Doğru Yol Partisi) had dissolved a few months after the Prime Minister and the leader of RP, Necmettin Erbakan, signed the advisory proposals prepared by the National Security Council at the decisive 28 February meeting. The proposal was in clear contrast with the agenda of the RP. As the defender and representative of political Islam under the traditional banner of the ‘National View Movement' since 1969 in Turkey, the founder and the charismatic leader of the movement, Erbakan, suffered a major blow from his support base and faced a major setback to his leadership and grip over the party.

The Welfare Party was the successor of the independent political Islamist tradition beginning from the foundation of the National Order Party, which was followed by the National Salvation Party, both of which were closed down by military interventions, the former in 1971 and the latter in 1980. The discourse of the Islamist National View Movement remained generally the same from its birth until this day, mostly owing to the seamless leadership of Erbakan over the mentioned parties even if he was banned from political activity from time to time.

MG's discourse is based upon two pillars. Described popularly as the engines of ‘heavy industry', this was the first and the main underpinning of the newly founded movement, relying on state and/or state subsidized private enterprises. This state dominated development program was designed to create a macro-economic autarchy, maintaining self-sufficiency by manufacturing ‘machines which produce machines'. The second is 'spiritual development,' which essentially articulates the political perspective of the movement, oriented by Islamic values and principles, and envisioning to expand Islamist influence among society through empowered state-controlled Islamic institutions and long term social policies such as Quran courses for young children, legalizing the headscarf for women in civil service and universities, and illegalizing abortion. Combined, these two elements and the traditional frame of mind of the extreme right in Turkey essentially translates into a MG foreign policy defined by hostility against Israel fed by a strong penchant for anti-Zionism and preference towards strategic and economic partnerships with Islamic states.

Even though the National Salvation Party participated in coalitions formed even before 1980, the post-1980 coup d'état period saw a marked increase in the spread of political Islam in Turkish politics. The main motivation for the military intervention was to cease the social chaos that had gripped Turkey and overcome the deadlock in the political process, but the ideological momentum behind the movement was the Turkish-Islamic synthesis which was built up as an ‘antidote' for the leftist movement which gradually grew during the 1970s. The military elite defined the synthesis in the conceptual manifestation of ‘Ataturkism' and imposed a Turkish identity that was inseparable from religious identification. The military elite's foundational paradigm of Ataturkism was used as an operational code in the Turkish-Islamic context. Grounding its legitimacy on a religious-nationalist discourse, the coup of 1980 caused widespread conservatism in the social perception.

In the first elections after the new constitution was instituted, the centre-right Motherland Party (Anavatan Partisi, ANAP) won a landslide victory and put an end to state controlled economic policy, simultaneously with the rise of the new-right, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom. After import taxes and state-subsidies for farmers and industrial sector were lowered, the impact on the middle sized industries was severe; after which money was devalued so that Turkish industries could compete in the global market. Small-scale retailers and manufacturers that had sprung up from Anatolian towns gradually embraced the fiscal programs of MG ideology promoted by the state. A central factor contributing to the rise of political Islam during the 1990s was unsustainable urbanization and urban poverty. Migration from rural to urban areas beginning from the early 1970's onwards meant an aggregate transportation of the masses, creating shanties for every family in colossal slum districts, transforming Ankara and especially Istanbul to mega-villages. Slum-dwelling populations became easy targets for politicians who resorted to cheap populism and the RP was no exception. The primary ideological discourse which the RP drew upon was ‘Just Order' (Adil Düzen) which was designed pragmatically to read social conditions through a populist lens, thus supplying the votes of the masses that were falling quickly in to urban poverty to the RP. A carefully planned ideological transformation in tune with socio-economic realities catapulted the Welfare Party to the position of an inevitable political actor, going as far as to elect Erbakan as prime minister in 1996.

When the RP came to power, albeit in a coalition government, it had to no choice but to set the country's agenda amidst growing skepticism over the future stability of Turkey. The Turkish economy was at the edge of an abyss, struggling with high inflation rates and unemployment. The RP tried to superimpose a ‘Just Order' as a ‘retributive reckoning of the past' and launched deliberate provocations against the secular institutions and traditions of the Republic.

The RP's term in office was the scene of numerous scandals and tension. The RP government's foreign policy backfired after Erbakan's visit to Libya, where he listened in silence to Kaddafi's insults against Turkey's policies, including its relations with the US, Israel and the UK. The RP's term was marked with domestic scandals as well, such as threats of bloodshed it raised against the secular bloc in case of any preventive action against the RP's bid for a ‘next term in power'; describing religious high schools as the RP's ‘backyard', or a guaranteed voter base; and spectacles of cronyism and cozying up with the leaders of religious orders at lavish ‘fast breaking' dinners during Ramadan hosted at the residence of the prime ministry. With tensions running high, the tipping point that led to the onset of the 28 February period came with the actions of an RP mayor. The then Mayor of Sincan, a local district in Ankara, organized a called ‘Jerusalem Night' where young girls were covered in veils and boys dressed as Palestinian militants. The stage was set for mass cursing upon Israel, praising of Shariah and calls for jihad against the enemies of Islam. The day after the notorious provocation, armored tanks rolled across the main street of Sincan and the act described by the general staff merely as a calibration of balance for ‘tank tracks', was interpreted by the media as a calibration of balance for ‘democracy'.

These incitements cost the RP both its legitimacy and its very existence. Not even passed its first year in office, the attorney general of the supreme court of justice prosecuted the RP to be banned. As a survivor of two military coups which closed MG oriented parties down among others, it could easily be argued that political Islamist movements in Turkey have proved immune to ‘legal procedures'. In this sense, the final strike to MG's political success came three months before the prosecution, not from the courts but from the military again, by the imposition of the advisory decisions concluded by the National Security Council (MGK) to the government. The main thrust of the decisions was the commitment to protect the principle of secularism and support institutionalized measures to oppose fundamentalist institutions such as religious orders; the decisions also cut the educational period for imams and religious preacher schools from six to three years; and increased compulsory education to six years nationwide.

The open assault by the military elite against the MG's social bedrock and ideological instruments left RP in a quandary. Fearing the loss of his party's support, Prime Minister Erbakan tried to resist signing the document enshrining the MGK decisions, but the decisions went through the council of ministers.

Yet, the political provocations that brought an end to the RP were not embraced wholeheartedly by its entire electorate. The new Anatolian bourgeoisie was not only growing weary of an ailing economy, but also of government policies that seemed to encourage conflict and government bickering, not fiscal stability. The so-called Anatolian ‘tigers' succeeded in accumulating considerable capital and earning power, enabling them to compete on a global scale after the trauma of ANAP's liberal economic policy. Organized under a fusion of religious and capitalist ethos forged by the ‘Independent Industrialists and Businessmen Association' (MÜSİAD) which was founded to serve as a viable ‘alternative' framework for the capitalist elite to the north-west centered grand-scale manufacturers grouped under the ‘Turkish Industrialists' and Businessmen's Association' (TÜSİAD); the Anatolian capitalist elite sought policies promising compromise and stability from within the Islamist political movement. This ‘reformist' pursuit found its banner bearers and rallied around the then mayor of Istanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, vice president of RP Abdullah Gül, and the party's highly influential member and MP, Bülent Arınç.

AKP's timing for its establishment came upon a rare conjugation of events. As mentioned above, the emergence of the new Anatolian elite created the much needed incentive and means for change in the ranks of the Islamist movement. The RP's insistence on cultural symbols and Islamic practices exhausted its political energy and left a mess of the economy. The intended beneficiaries of MG's Just Order program-the unemployed masses and destitute migrant communities-were left to suffer under the rubbles of a collapsed economy. The democratic left and nationalist party coalition that emerged following the next election did not have a chance in dealing with the worst financial crisis that Turkey ever had to face. Two centre-right parties, ANAP and DYP, were locked in a political stalemate and lost their ability to produce an active opposition after a crisis of leadership in their inner circles, leaving the centre-right in a vacuum. Meanwhile, the reformist Erdoğan-Gül-Arınç threesome waited on the sidelines for the situation to ripen.

The 28 February events cooled down after the closure of RP and the banning of Erbakan and its central command staff from politics. The Virtue Party was founded in order to carry once again the National View Movement to the political arena, but this time Erbakan faced his greatest political challenge in holding on to what he still believed to be ‘his' political followers. But with a ‘legalized' absence from political life and sufficient backing from delegates, the reformist threesome seized an opportunity to challenge the traditionalist bloc in the party congress. Although Gül lost the presidency with three votes, the Virtue Party's congress clearly showed that another path for Islamist politics would be cleared and was perhaps inevitable, given the demands of some segments of Turkish society. When there was no tradition to claim and no movement to reform after the internal party reckoning, and the reformist bloc within the Virtue Party had legitimized their departure through an electoral outcome, they founded the Justice and Development Party. This ended up dividing the Virtue Party by draining many of its MP's in parliament. During the establishment of the AKP, Erdoğan, the pillar of the reformist wing and the de facto leader of the new political movement, was serving his sentence in prison for a provocative poem he had read. This experience clinched Erdoğan's immense popularity among the public and rendered him a ‘veteran' profile, as it once had done for his mentor, Necmettin Erbakan.

AKP's Discoursal Shift

The first item on the AKP agenda amidst the political turmoil they grew from was to construct a new identity for the party. The AKP positioned itself on the centre-right by branding its new discourse as ‘conservative democracy' which obviously derived from the political bloc in the Germanic centre-right, the ‘Christian Democratic Union'. Regarding the February 28 process as an ‘official' and strong dis-identification towards political Islamist activity from the perspective of the mainstream media, the military elite and intellectuals; the AKP transformed ‘Islamic' to ‘conservative' as a discoursive replacement of ‘Christian'. Erdoğan made a point to emphasize that his movement had taken ‘off the shirt of the National View.' Propagandistic identification based upon discoursive brand-names and metaphors supplied AKP with immense media attention, and eased its hand when it came to coping with accusations that the AKP constituted a threat to the Turkish Republic, given their Islamist credentials and political past. The profiles of the MP candidates for the 2002 elections presented a Western-ish, conservative showcase filled with popular politicians transferred from ANAP and DYP, thereby solidifying the context of a ‘conservative democracy' outlook.

By filling the void on Turkey's centre-right wing, AKP's primary political conversation was packaged and presented as the issue of Turkey's accession to the European Union. The AKP leveraged this highly sensitive topic as its ‘make it or break it' priority, and it represented not only the opportunities sought by the new capitalist class, but also the party's ambitions to impose cultural-religious demands in a ‘Western guise'. Some major difference in discourse between the AKP and the National View-fashioned parties can be seen from their approach towards EU membership. The National View parties' exclusive insistence on religious and cultural rights, precluding any attempt at EU membership, has served as a sour reminder of their intentions against the Republic's secular tradition. Following the ultimate outcome of the 28 February process, the Islamist paradigm in the social context took on a tactical shift and mobilized both international and domestic support by utilizing the language of international norms, legal instruments and procedures; abandoning its discourse on the ‘social reality of religion' and adopting instead one grounded upon ‘human rights'. Constricting the conceptual essence of the legal arrangements required from Turkey by the EU Accession Commission, the AKP embraced a narrow interpretation of what it chose to understood by ‘freedom of expression' and used it as an instrument to pave the way for religious high schools in Turkey and lifting the ban on the headscarf in universities.

Nevertheless, the AKP's efforts to legislate fundamental rights and reforms guided by the Copenhagen Criteria were supported and approved by public majority in its first government term. Throughout this period, the AKP deliberately avoided any rattling measures that would create tension on the political agenda, both to fulfill the promise of economic stability and to clinch the social perception which they were constructing regarding its political discoursive position. This strategy supplied the AKP with an avalanche of votes in the 2004 municipal and 2007 general elections, triggering a wave of radical mobility in state structures due to the won chairs in the parliament, ministries, administrative offices and local governments. With sufficient electoral support and a weak opposition, the AKP mounted a system of widespread political nepotism in the state administration and business, appointing pro-AKP bureaucrats and officials to high ranks, and favoring acquainted businessmen competing for large-scale government bids. For the most part, this was carried out regardless of performance or merit. The only criteria seemed to be demonstrating enough outward signs of religiousness such as ties with religious orders and showing off a veiled wife.

The most recent two elections, the 2007 general and 2009 municipal votes have shown a familiar pattern common to Turkish political history. Right wing populism, beginning with the ‘second group' in the 1921-23 parliament, continuing with the Terakkiperver Fırka and Serbest Fırka, had shown that religious political discourse is a necessity to endure against secular bloc in times of turmoil due to existential crises. But as can be observed in the Democratic Party's discourse (1946-1960), religious orientation and populist discourse grew inversely proportional to economic achievements and/or to the welfare level of the nation. The AKP's second term in government is showing a strong tendency to repeat the same pattern of religious populism.

Not even one year after the municipal elections held in March 2004, Prime Minister Erdoğan set out an agenda to reignite the frozen issues surrounding the 28 February process. On November 15, 2005, after the European Court of Human Rights decided to uphold a ban on headscarves in Turkish universities, Erdoğan issued stern criticism and condemnation of the verdict, going as far as to state that "only ulama [Islamic religious scholars] could" make this decision. Turning a blind eye and even endorsing ‘illegal' Quran courses outside of state approved curriculum in public schools; making a point to underline that 99% of Turkey is Muslim in an effort to define the populations as Muslim first, and citizens of Turkey second; assigning clergy to arbitrate religious disputes rather than legal scholars, can be counted among what Erdoğan has made some of his sticking points. Erdoğan's growing impatience on the headscarf issue finally reared its head on January 15, 2008 when he attended the first meeting of the UN-sponsored Alliance of Civilizations forum in Spain. In his by now infamous response to questions posed by journalists, he said ‘What if the headscarf is a political symbol, is that a reason to ban it?' This was followed with the announcement that the wheels had been set in motion to introduce a legislation proposal at the constitutional level to formally lift the ban.

AKP's further instigation and attempts to rock the central pillar of the secular republic led Turkey's chief prosecutor, Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya, to lodge a case accusing the AKP of "anti-secular activities" and "trying to turn the country into an Islamic state" in March 2008. Although Turkey's Constitutional Court did not permanently shut down the party, the court did rule that the AKP had shown signs of being "a focal point for anti-secular activity" and recommended the party be deprived of fifty percent of the financial aid it receives from the state treasury. It is important to remember that from 28 February, 1997 up to the present, the military elite have remained ‘absent' as an active political opposition, leaving the ‘secular' checks and balance to the juristocracy. The verdict for the AKP was indeed a condemnation by the legal branch, but did not present the ‘veterans of democracy' with a populist in-way to once again assume a public political role-the same cannot be said for the political Islamist cadre, which levied the case as a means to cast itself as the victim of a political plot.

The religious tendencies in AKP's discourse are becoming more evident in its second term in government. Abdullah Gűl's candidacy for presidency was put forward due to electoral demands for a ‘pious president'. AKP's ascending political Islamist leanings reached its climax as Erdoğan stormed off the stage in Davos as a reaction against Israel's attack on Palestine. Vowing never to return to the World Economic Forum, Erdoğan received a hero's welcome by cheering throngs in Istanbul. Consolidating not only the approval of his supporters but also the sympathy of the Arab-Muslim street, Erdoğan expected to claim the pedestal as the main voice of opposition against Israel. And to conceal the crippling effects of the financial crisis on the domestic economy, the government launched a state-aid package for the poor, while spending a quarter of the budget in a few months time for the March provincial election. But what they reaped was far below their expectations.

The local elections held in March dealt the AKP the first, and so far only, blow to its voter percentage in its history. Not only did the AKP lose nearly all the local governments in Turkey's coastal cities, but its votes dropped by 8%, including in the provinces that are the hometowns of important ministries held by AKP politicians. In response, Erdoğan swiftly moved to enact cabinet reform, which transformed the visage of the party to a ‘darker shade of green'. Although only eight of the ministers were replaced among the twenty six member cabinet, the selection of the incoming ministers can be interpreted as a sign that the AKP is beginning to revert more openly to its foundations, including a more faithful embrace of the National View ideology. The former Minister of Justice and former MP of the Welfare Party, Mehmet Ali Şahin, was replaced by Sadullah Ergin, who had earlier supported Abdullah Gül in the FP congress when he served as a provincial head of the Virtue Party. Another replacement was in the Ministry of Development and Settlement, where Mustafa Demir, who was the founder of the MÜSİAD branch office in Samsun, was made minister. Other replaced ministers are Nihat Ergün and Ömer Dinçer, who both played an active role in the establishment of the party. But most sensational among the list of assignments was the appointment of Bülent Arınç to the post of vice prime minister. Arınç was one of the foremost MP's in the 28 February term parliament and founder of the AKP, along with Gül and Erdoğan. It was his name that was repeatedly cited in the indictment for AKP's closure and it is for sure that Erdoğan chose to use Arınç as a lightning conductor to cope with the critics against more radical Islamist discourse.

It is yet too early to tell whether the AKP is following the historical pattern of the right wing parties that dot Turkish political history and has already begun its auto-catalysis phase. Yet, the run-up to the recent provincial elections in Istanbul, a city that can determine the political fate of any party, witnessed a well-organized opposition movement. Internal democratic procedures are following in order, province by province, and more vocal intra-opposition is being made against candidates who had Erdoğan's backing. The AKP's dynamics was, and will continue to be, determined largely by the government's handling of the economic crisis, progress on Turkey's EU bid, and domestic stability-all of which are tricky issues which Erdoğan is struggling to hold the reins on. The checks and balances equation is changing within the secular bloc from the juristocracy to the military elite again and the parliamentary opposition is uniting against the AKP's monopoly over legislative authority.

Hüsamettin Cindoruk, a veteran politician who enjoys a high level of respect and popularity in Turkey, was recently elected as the leader of the DYP. Abdüllatif Şener, one of the most important figures in the foundation of the AKP, who served as vice prime minister in the first AKP term, had earlier resigned from the AKP and has founded a new party. Erdoğan is trying hard to keep his MP's united as one in the parliament, but without any doubt, the awakening centre-right opposition will likely weigh their options carefully and seek opportunities to recruit MP's from the AKP. If the destabilizing effects of the severe economic downturn in Turkey lead to a political crisis and the recent balance of power in the parliament disintegrates, as was witnessed in 2001, then the forthcoming general elections, currently scheduled for 2011, could be held sooner than planned.