Justice and Development Party, Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, abbreviated JDP in English and AK PARTİ or AKP† in Turkish, is a centre-right political party in Turkey. The party is the largest in Turkey, with 334 members of parliament. Its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is Prime Minister, while fellow party member and former PM Abdullah Gül is President.
Founded in 2001 by members of a number of existing parties, the party won a landslide victory in the 2002 election, winning over two-thirds of parliamentary seats. Abdullah Gül became Prime Minister, but a constitutional amendment in 2003 allowed Erdogan to take his place. In early elections in 2007, the AKP increased its share of the vote to 47%; its number of seats fell to 341, but Erdogan was returned as PM, while Gül was elected President.
The AK Party portrays itself as a conservative party that advocates a liberal market economy and Turkish membership in the European Union. In 2005 the AK Party was granted observer membership in the European People's Party.
2007 constitutional referendum
After the opposition parties deadlocked the 2007 presidential election by boycotting the parliament, the ruling AK party proposed a constitutional reform package. The reform package was first vetoed by president Sezer. Then he applied to the Turkish constituonal court about the reform package, because the president is unable to veto amendments for the second time. The Turkish constituonal court did not find any problems in the package and 69% of the voters supported the constitutional changes. The reforms consisted of:
electing the president by popular vote instead of by parliament;
reducing the presidential term from seven years to five;
allowing the president to stand for re-election for a second term;
holding general elections every four years instead of five;
reducing the quorum of lawmakers needed for parliamentary decisions from 367 to 184.
Closure cases
The Justice and Development Party has faced two closure cases in its history. Just 10 days before the national elections of 2002, Turkey's chief prosecutor, Sabih Kanadoğlu, asked the Turkish constitutional court to close the Justice and Development Party, which was leading in the opinion polls at that time. The chief prosecutor accused the Justice and Development Party of abusing the law and justice. He based his case on the fact that the party's leader had been banned from political life. The European Commission had already criticised Turkey for banning the party's leader from participating in elections. The court gave its verdict on 9 July 2009, rejecting the demand, and the case against the AK Party was terminated.
At a international press conference in Spain, the prime minister answered a question of a journalist by saying, "What if the headscarf is a symbol? Even if it were a political symbol, does that give one the right to ban it? Could you bring prohibitions to symbols?" These statements led to a joint proposal of the AK Party and the MHP for changing the constitution and the law to lift a ban on young women wearing headscarves at universities. This was one of the main reasons for Turkey's chief prosecutor, Abdurrahman Yalçınkaya, to ask the Constitutional Court to close the AK Party. A court-appointed rapporteur, Osman Can, advocated in his report that the Court should reject the closure case. Four members voted to cut public funding for the party, while the court's chairman voted against closing it down. The court rejected the demands of the prosecutor and did not ban the party. The European Union welcomed the decision by Turkey's highest court not to ban the ruling AK Party.
2009 local elections
The Turkish local elections of 2009 took place during the financial crisis of 2007–2010. After the success of the AK Party in the 2007 general elections, the party saw a decline in the local elections of 2009. In these elections the AK Party received 39% of the vote, 3% less than in the local elections of 2004. Still, the AK Party remained the dominating party in Turkey. The second party CHP received 23% of the vote and the third party MHP received 16% of the vote. The AK Party won in Turkey's largest cities: Ankara and Istanbul.
2010 constitutional referendum
Reforming the Constitution was one of the main pledges of the AK Party during the 2007 election campaign. The main opposition party CHP was not interested in altering the Constitution on a big scale, making it impossible to form a Constitutional Commission (Anayasa Uzlaşma Komisyonu). The amendments lacked the two-thirds majority needed to instantly become law, but secured 336 votes in the 550 seat parliament - enough to put the proposals to a referendum. The reform package included a number of issues: such as the right of individuals to appeal to the highest court, the creation of the ombudsman’s office, the possibility to negotiate a nation-wide labour contract, gender equality, the ability of civilian courts to convict members of the military, the right of civil servants to go on strike, a privacy law, and the structure of the Constitutional Court. The referendum was agreed by a majority of 58%.
Formation
The AK Party was established by a wide range of politicians of various political parties and a number of new politicians. The core of the party was formed from the reformist faction (Turkish: yenilikçiler) of the Islamist Virtue Party, including people such as Abdullah Gül and Bülent Arınç. A second founding group consisted of members of the social conservative Motherland Party who had been close to Turgut Özal, such as Cemil Çiçek and Abdülkadir Aksu. Some members of the Turkish Democratic Party, such as Hüseyin Çelik and Köksal Toptan, joined the AKP. Some members, such as Kürşad Tüzmen, had nationalist backgrounds whilst others had Muslim-leftist backgrounds. In addition a large number of people joined a political party for the first time, such as Ali Babacan, Selma Aliye Kavaf, Egemen Bağış and Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu. All of these people joined Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to found the new party.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan became the leader, stating that "the AK Party is not a political party with a religious axis", implying a break with the Islamist tradition. Rather, the party bills itself as a mainstream conservative party in the European tradition. However critics accused it of harboring a hidden Islamist agenda and other critics have highlighted that Hitler's Mein Kampf has once again became a best selling book in Turkey during Erdogan's tenure.
History
The AK party won a sweeping victory in the 2002 elections, which saw every party previously represented in the Grand National Assembly ejected from the chamber. In the process, it won a two-thirds majority of seats, becoming the first Turkish party in 11 years to win an outright majority. Erdoğan normally would have become prime minister, but was banned from holding any political office after a 1994 incident in which he read a poem deemed pro-Islamist by judges. As a result, Gül became prime minister. It survived the crisis over the 2003 invasion of Iraq despite a massive back bench rebellion where over a hundred AK Party MPs joined those of the opposition Republican People's Party in parliament to prevent the government from allowing the United States to launch a Northern offensive in Iraq from Turkish territory. Later, Erdoğan's ban was abolished with the help of the CHP and Erdoğan became prime minister by being selected to parliament after a by-election in Siirt.
The AK Party has undertaken structural reforms, and during its rule Turkey has seen rapid growth and an end to its three decade long period of hyperinflation. Inflation had fallen to 8.8% by 2004.
Influential business publications such as The Economist consider the AK Party's government the most successful in Turkey in decades.
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