Sezgin Tüzün

AKP is not a party whose discourse coincides with its action but conflicts with it. Although their rhetoric is in line with the expectations of the voter base; AKP is being built in favor of the wealthy whose path has been cleared, in order to add wealth to their wealth through its actions and economic policies.

With the pandemic and the impact of its unmanageability added on top of the ongoing 18 years of erosion of power, widespread poverty/unemployment/insecurity, corruption, and economic crisis, how is Erdoğan's party still able to sustain the support of 30 percent of the total voters?

Erdoğan and AKP realized that the 2002-2015 period had come to an end and that new structures were inevitable in order to remain in power, and set sail from pan-Islamism to nationalist Islamism through joint recruitment and replacement.

AKP has gone through several turning points. One of these is how the state of affairs reached in 2011 transferred into next years through internal feuds, and another one is the remembrance of Erdoğan's tram metaphor.

Even though the 2002 elections of AKP's rise to power were not as crooked and unequal as the 1991 elections, they resulted in perhaps the most unequal and crooked parliamentary distribution among the parties in comparison to all elections from 1983 onwards.