The initial step taken on August 14, 2001 cannot be viewed merely as the submission of a political party’s founding petition within the annals of international political history; rather, it is the reincarnation of a millennium-old, deep-rooted civilisational vision on the modern world stage. Today, having left a quarter of a century behind, the AK Party is not merely a tale of national development within its borders, but an unparalleled 25-year epic of democracy on a global scale. Coming to power with immense public favour just 16 months after its founding, and steering the country with uninterrupted stability for a quarter of a century, this political movement has secured a highly exceptional place in world political history.
The greatest power behind this stability lies in the fact that this movement is not a rootless structure blown about by the wind. It carries on its shoulders, as a historical trust, the democratic struggle of the late Prime Minister Adnan Menderes and his companions, who sacrificed their lives for the nation’s beliefs during the arduous days of the single-party era. The mighty plane tree founded by our President and Chairman Recep Tayyip Erdogan – under whose shade our nation and oppressed geographies have drawn a breath of relief for 25 years – is the very embodiment of this tremendous historical legacy.
While the lifespans of political parties are generally measured by election results or their terms in government, the AK Party’s ability to overcome successive global and national crises with the continuous support of vastly diverse social segments over 25 years can be explained by a much more structural concept: Its “capacity for political translation”.
This capacity is the process of accurately hearing the expectations, needs, and objections within society, transforming them into viable party programmes, budgets, and public policies, and submitting the resulting outcomes back for societal evaluation. Social needs do not always arrive in politics as ready-made texts; it is here that the AK Party has established a colossal “translation” mechanism that turns seemingly disparate experiences into common problems and solutions. Indeed, for someone of a generation like mine – who grew up in a Turkiye shaped by the AK Party, took on responsibilities in its youth branches since childhood, and today serves as a member of parliament and the party’s secretary-general – this political ground is the very essence of that transformation.
To grasp the magnitude of this transformation, one must look back at the Turkiye of the 1990s. It is essential to read those years not just as an “era of a unipolar world and severe economic crises”, but as a colossal “age of political collapse and instability” that paralysed the state and deepened societal fault lines.