A New Name, A New Party, and a New Government
Can a political party shed its entire legacy simply by changing its name so the voters think it is really a new party? Turkey's new Justice and Development Party (AKP) has answered that question with a resounding "yes".
Despite its rather awkward name, the AKP is the descendant of the Virtue Party, which was the descendant of the Welfare Party. Why so many names? Simple. When your party is banned by your country's courts, and you as its leaders do not want to reconcile yourselves to passing the long, hot days of the Turkish summer and the long, cold nights of the Turkish winter sipping strong Turkish coffee and recalling what might have been, you have few options. Few options of course are better than no options, and here is your short list:
(1) Reinvent the old mechanism, e.g. change your party's name and see how the repackaged version sells with the electorate. Take a poll to decide the new name and how the "new" party should present itself.
(2) Insert yourself into an existing party as an unelected advisor. The most powerful people in government often are those whose names you never know and whose faces you never see because they are relegated to advisory work in some smoke-filled back room.
Option (1) is obviously more attractive. Hence the Welfare Party was banned but quickly morphed into the Virtue Party. Then the Virtue Party was banned, and the AKP emerged.
Why were all these parties banned? Turkey - especially Turkey's military - basically worships Turkey's adherence to secular rule. The Welfare/Virtue/AKP parties have deep roots in Islam. The military previously declared and acted on threats to prevent Welfare/Virtue from gaining control of the government. If nothing else, that reality of itself was more than enough to send the Welfare/Virtue leaders away for a serious rethink session.
The AKP is the result of that rethink session. The AKP is not just rebranded Welfare/Virtue. The AKP is led by the same group who led Welfare/Virtue, but now the strategy is much broader. The leadership apparently decided a direct appeal to Islamic charitability would only give the courts a reason to ban the AKP. So the AKP's first big move was to convince voters it was not just the same party with a new name. It did this effectively by renouncing all its old ideals. Suddenly the AKP was a pro-EU, pro-NATO, pro-free markets party.
But like most other grand political transformations, the evolution of the AKP has its share of still-roaming skeletons. The most dangerous of these involves AKP leader Recep Taya Erdogan. When Mr. Erdogan was a more devout political Islamist (e.g. back in his Welfare/Virtue Party days), he was arrested for reading a poem that described the institutions of Islam such as prayers and mosques as the weapons of war. The Turkish courts convicted Mr. Erdogan of inciting religious riots - a major no-no in secular Turkey. That criminal conviction meant one thing to Mr. Erdogan: Because of that conviction, he could never be prime minister unless he could somehow change the country's Constitution.
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