Turkish Democracy Under the Justice and Development Party (JDP), 2002-2014

Abstract

Democratisation has become an aspirational phenomenon in many parts of the world. This paper analyses the role of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (the ‘JDP’) in Turkey’s current democratisation process. In order to analyse the democratisation process led by the JDP government, we must understand the nature of the JDP. Critics argue that the JDP, though professing to be a conservative democratic party, is in fact a fundamentalist Islamic party with a hidden agenda to establish a Sharia-based regime in Turkey. They feel that the JDP, in hiding its real aims, performs a game of dissimulation (takiyye) in order to achieve political legitimacy and sufficient political and constitutional power to realise its hidden agenda. This argument raises a number of questions: Can a pro-EU party like the JDP, which gained significant and increasing support in the 2002, 2007 and 2011 Turkish general elections, have an Islamist hidden agenda? How would we explain the increasing public support for the JDP and the genuine democratisation reforms led by it? Could Conservative Democracy, the political identity of the JDP, be regarded as an appropriate political approach for Turkey? Is the ‘hidden agenda’ hypothesis real or imagined?These are some of the key questions being discussed by Turkey’s elites in relation to the JDP. Regardless of the point of view we take to answer these questions, there remains a grey zone, which the writer of this paper will attempt to clarify.