Prospects for Democratization under the Erdogan Leadership

Abstract

Αn analysis of Turkish politics and prospects for democratization under Erdogan’s leadership governments in the recent past years is presented in this paper. It is important how the current president of the Turkish democracy, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, succeeded to direct and manage the AKP party during the last decades and he had led it to continuous victories during all the elections in his country. The Turkish type of secularism has been a successful project that allowed Turkish citizens to consider religion as a system of belief and morality and not as a prescriptive set of political rules. Kemalism had been linked with conservatism and has lost the ability to understand the society and its needs, since it used to act only as the protector of secularism against an obvious Islamic danger. The AKP had not directly confronted with the secularist establishment while it followed a clever strategy in de-emphasizing ideology and in engaging with Kemalism on its own terms.