Adem Yavuz Arslan* 

On August 14, 2001, a group of politicians who had broken away from Turkey’s Islamist movement founded the Justice and Development Party (AKP).

Twenty-five years later, the party has governed Turkey for almost its entire existence. That alone makes the AKP one of the most consequential political movements in modern Turkish history. Under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, it defeated the country’s old secular establishment, transformed the economy, curtailed the military’s political power, opened accession negotiations with the European Union and won election after election. But the story of the AKP is about much more than electoral success.

It is also the story of how a country once hailed as a possible model for reconciling political Islam, democracy and a market economy gradually moved toward highly centralized, personalized rule. The great paradox of the AKP’s 25 years is therefore this: The institutions that constrained Erdoğan during his first decade in power were also the institutions that made Turkey successful. As those constraints disappeared, Erdoğan became stronger but Turkey’s institutions became weaker.

Born out of Turkey’s old authoritarianism

The AKP did not emerge in a vacuum.

Turkey in the 1990s was plagued by unstable coalition governments, chronic inflation, corruption scandals, banking crises and a political system in which the military considered itself the ultimate guardian of the secular republic.

The February 28, 1997, military intervention against the Islamist-led government of Necmettin Erbakan was particularly consequential.

Erdoğan and other younger politicians, including Abdullah Gül and Bülent Arınç, eventually broke with Erbakan’s Milli Görüş, or National Outlook, movement.

They called themselves reformists.

Their new party would not define itself as Islamist but as “conservative democratic.”

The distinction mattered.

The AKP promised to pursue European Union membership, embrace the market economy, reduce the military’s role in politics, expand fundamental rights and fight corruption.

Then came the devastating financial crisis of 2001.

Banks collapsed. Unemployment soared. Public confidence in the political establishment disintegrated.

In the November 2002 election, voters effectively swept most of the old political order out of parliament.

The AKP won about 34 percent of the vote and secured a parliamentary majority.

Turkey wanted a new beginning.

Erdoğan’s party offered one.

The AKP that the West admired

It is impossible to understand what happened later without acknowledging the achievements of the AKP’s early years.

Between 2002 and 2007, Turkey experienced rapid economic growth. Inflation fell dramatically. Public debt declined. The banking system became more resilient, and foreign investment surged.

Yet an important part of this success story preceded the AKP.

After the 2001 financial crisis, Turkey had adopted a far-reaching economic stabilization program associated with then-economy minister Kemal Derviş.

Central bank independence, banking reform, fiscal discipline and independent regulatory institutions formed the backbone of the new economic architecture.

The crucial decision Erdoğan’s government made was not to dismantle that architecture.

It largely preserved it.

At the same time, the European Union provided Turkey with a powerful external democratic anchor.

EU harmonization packages expanded rights, strengthened civilian control over the military and introduced reforms in areas ranging from freedom of expression to cultural rights and the prevention of torture.

In 2005 Turkey formally began accession negotiations with the EU.

For perhaps the first time in decades, Turkey appeared capable of achieving economic growth and political liberalization simultaneously.

That was why the early AKP attracted support far beyond its conservative religious base.

Liberals supported it. Business leaders supported it. Many Kurds supported it. The faith-based Gülen movement supported it. European leaders embraced it.

For Western policymakers searching after 9/11 for evidence that a Muslim-majority country could combine democratic politics, economic modernization and religious conservatism, Erdoğan’s Turkey appeared remarkably promising.

That image would not survive.

When political survival replaced reform

Between 2007 and 2010 Erdoğan confronted genuine threats from Turkey’s old establishment. There was the 2007 presidential crisis and the military’s so-called “e-memorandum.” In 2008 the Constitutional Court came within one vote of shutting down the AKP. These confrontations reinforced a lesson inside the governing party: Winning elections might not be enough to remain in power.

Gradually, political survival replaced reform as the organizing principle of Erdoğan’s rule. The 2010 constitutional referendum became an important turning point. Reforms presented as dismantling military tutelage also altered the balance of power inside the judiciary. At the time many liberals and European observers supported the changes as another stage of democratization. In retrospect the referendum marked an important step in the restructuring of institutions that would later become increasingly vulnerable to political control.

Then came Erdoğan’s greatest electoral triumph. In 2011, the AKP won nearly half the national vote. Paradoxically, the moment of its greatest democratic legitimacy also marked the acceleration of its departure from the reformism of its first decade.

The old military establishment had been defeated. The traditional center-right had collapsed. Much of the media was increasingly under pressure or changing ownership. The balance inside the judiciary was shifting. The AKP was no longer merely governing the Turkish state. Increasingly, it was beginning to dominate it.

This is perhaps the simplest way to describe the difference between the two eras: The early AKP derived its power from the rules. The later AKP increasingly rewrote the rules to preserve its power.

Gezi and the politics of polarization

The 2013 Gezi Park protests exposed this transformation to the world.

What began as a small environmental demonstration against plans to redevelop a park in central İstanbul turned into nationwide anti-government protests after a harsh police intervention.

Erdoğan could have interpreted Gezi as a warning from a changing, urban and increasingly assertive segment of Turkish society.

Instead, he increasingly portrayed the protests as a conspiracy against his government.

The language of politics hardened.

The distinction between “us” and “them” became central to Erdoğan’s political strategy.

Critics were increasingly portrayed not simply as political opponents but as agents of foreign powers, terrorists, traitors or participants in conspiracies against the nation.

Polarization was no longer merely a consequence of politics.

It became a method of governing.

The corruption investigations that changed everything

Then came another earthquake.

In December 2013, police and prosecutors launched sweeping corruption investigations implicating cabinet ministers, businessmen and people close to Erdoğan.

The investigations produced extraordinary allegations involving bribery, illicit financial dealings and political influence.

Erdoğan rejected the investigations as a judicial coup orchestrated by the Gülen movement. The government’s allegations of Gülenist involvement, however, did not answer another important question: Why were the underlying corruption claims never subjected to a credible, independent investigation?

Instead, prosecutors and police officers involved in the cases were removed. Parliament declined to send four former ministers implicated in the scandal to the Supreme State Council for trial.

The episode represented a profound reversal for a party that had originally campaigned on fighting the “three Ys”: yolsuzluk, yoksulluk and yasaklar — corruption, poverty and prohibitions.

After 2013, the institutions capable of investigating corruption themselves became progressively weaker.

July 15 and the birth of a new regime

Nothing transformed Erdoğan’s Turkey more dramatically than a failed coup on July 15, 2016. Questions remain about the intelligence failures preceding the attempt, the military chain of command and the authorities’ handling of the events that night. Parliament also failed to produce a conclusive public investigation of the attempted coup.

Some of Erdoğan’s critics have even drawn parallels between the failed coup and the Reichstag fire, which Hitler exploited to consolidate his power in Nazi Germany.

The coup attempt was a national trauma. But what followed went far beyond prosecuting those responsible for the attempted takeover. Under the state of emergency, more than 120,000 public employees were dismissed or suspended, while hundreds of thousands of people were investigated over alleged terrorism links.

Media organizations, associations, foundations, schools and companies were closed, seized or transferred to state control.

The post-coup purges reshaped the state and created the political conditions for an even more fundamental transformation. In the 2017 constitutional referendum, Turkey narrowly approved replacing its parliamentary system with an executive presidency.

The office of prime minister was abolished. The president became both head of state and chief executive. Ministers no longer needed to be elected members of parliament and were no longer politically accountable to parliament in the traditional parliamentary sense.

The new system took full effect in 2018. Power increasingly flowed toward the presidential palace. Turkey had not merely changed governments. It had changed its system of government.

The party disappeared into the leader

The AKP itself was also transformed. The original party contained multiple political centers and influential figures. Abdullah Gül served as president. Bülent Arınç had his own political weight. Ahmet Davutoğlu became prime minister. Ali Babacan was internationally respected for his stewardship of the economy.

Over time most of the prominent figures associated with the AKP’s founding period were marginalized, departed or created rival parties.

The distance between Erdoğan and the AKP gradually disappeared. What had begun as a broad conservative political movement became increasingly indistinguishable from the political authority of one man.

This may be one of the most consequential changes in the AKP’s 25-year history. Erdoğan did not simply dominate his party. The party, government and state increasingly became intertwined around Erdoğan.

The economic story followed the political one.

There is a striking parallel between the AKP’s political and economic trajectories. Its early economic success rested on an independent central bank, a strengthened banking regulator, fiscal discipline, the EU membership process and a predictable environment for domestic and international investors.

As political power became personalized, economic policymaking followed. Central bank governors were dismissed before completing their terms. Erdoğan’s unconventional insistence that high interest rates cause high inflation increasingly shaped monetary policy.

The consequences were severe. Turkey suffered a currency crisis and a prolonged inflation shock. Although the government later returned to more conventional monetary policies, the damage to institutional credibility was substantial.

Corruption indicators tell a similarly troubling story. Turkey scored 31 out of 100 in Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index, ranking 124th among 182 countries.

Corruption, however, is not simply about whether politicians steal money. It is fundamentally about institutions. The strongest safeguards against corruption are an independent judiciary, a free press, transparent public procurement, effective parliamentary oversight and an accountable bureaucracy.

When those institutions weaken, corruption becomes more difficult to expose and more difficult to punish. That is why Turkey’s democratic decline and its governance problems cannot be separated. They are part of the same story.

From EU candidate to “electoral autocracy”

The contrast between 2005 and 2026 is extraordinary. In 2005 Erdoğan was leading a country negotiating for membership in the European Union. Twenty-one years later, Freedom House classifies Turkey as “Not Free,” giving it 32 points out of 100 in its 2026 assessment. The V-Dem Institute classifies Turkey as an “electoral autocracy.”

Erdoğan’s most formidable political rival, İstanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, is in prison. Kurdish politician Selahattin Demirtaş has spent years behind bars. Judicial pressure on opposition politicians has become one of the defining issues in Turkish politics.

Yet Turkey is not a system without meaningful political competition. That distinction matters. Elections remain important. Opposition parties can win — and have won — Turkey’s largest cities. The government can suffer significant electoral defeats, as the 2019 and 2024 local elections demonstrated.

Civil society remains resilient, and Turkish voters continue to display remarkable political engagement. What Erdoğan has built is therefore better understood not as a system without elections but as one in which elections continue while the institutional playing field has become increasingly tilted in favor of those in power.

That is precisely what makes Turkey important beyond its borders.

Why Erdoğan’s 25 years matter beyond Turkey

The AKP’s story is not merely a Turkish story. It offers a bigger lesson about democratic backsliding in the 21st century.

Democracy does not always die in a military coup. Elected leaders do not necessarily abolish elections. Parliaments may continue to meet. Courts may continue to issue rulings.

Newspapers may continue to publish. Opposition parties may continue to campaign.

The transformation can occur gradually. A government wins elections and uses that legitimacy to weaken institutions capable of constraining it. The judiciary becomes less independent. Media ownership changes. Regulators lose autonomy. Public resources become increasingly intertwined with political loyalty. The constitution is rewritten. Political competition survives, but under increasingly unequal conditions.

Each individual step can be defended as legal, necessary or temporary. Only after years have passed does the scale of the transformation become unmistakable.

This is what makes Erdoğan’s Turkey relevant to debates about democratic erosion from Hungary to India and beyond. Turkey demonstrates that the central question in modern authoritarianism is not necessarily whether citizens are still allowed to vote. It is whether institutions remain strong enough to make their votes genuinely capable of changing power.

The great paradox of Erdoğan’s quarter-century

The AKP emerged from Turkey’s democratic deficiencies. Its leaders had experienced the authoritarianism of the old secular establishment.

They complained about politicized courts. They opposed military intervention. They criticized media campaigns against elected politicians. They promised to limit the power of the state over ordinary citizens. They promised to fight corruption. They pointed toward Europe.

Then, as Erdoğan consolidated power, many of those commitments faded.

It would nevertheless be historically misleading to claim that the AKP was always what it is today. The party really did change. And Turkey changed with it.

Understanding why may be the most important lesson of the AKP’s 25 years. During Erdoğan’s first decade, the institutions constraining his power were also producing Turkey’s success. Central bank independence created economic credibility. The EU process incentivized democratic reforms. A relatively pluralistic media scrutinized the government. Parliamentary politics required negotiation. Independent institutions put limits on executive power.

As Erdoğan escaped those constraints, his personal authority expanded. But the state’s institutional strength moved in the opposite direction.

That leaves Turkey with the great irony of the AKP era: During the party’s first decade, Turkey grew stronger as the AKP grew stronger. In the years that followed, Erdoğan’s power and Turkey’s institutional strength increasingly moved in opposite directions.

At 25, therefore, the most important question is not how many elections the AKP has won. By that measure, it is unquestionably one of the most successful political movements in the history of the Turkish Republic.

The more consequential question is what kind of state it has built. Twenty-five years ago, Erdoğan promised to transform Turkey. He succeeded.

But the Turkey he created bears remarkably little resemblance to the Turkey he promised.

*Adem Yavuz Arslan is a journalist with over two decades of experience in political reporting, investigative journalism and international conflict coverage. His work has focused on Turkey’s political landscape, including detailed reporting on the 2016 coup attempt and its aftermath, as well as broader issues related to media freedom and human rights. He has reported from conflict zones such as Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq, and has conducted in-depth research on high-profile cases, including the assassination of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. Arslan is the author of four books and has received journalism awards for his investigative work. Currently living in exile in Washington, D.C., he continues his journalism through digital media platforms, including his YouTube channel, Turkish Minute, TR724 and X.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Turkish Minute.