After celebrating its 23rd anniversary earlier this week, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) is looking forward to a comprehensive overhaul of its infrastructure in the coming year.
According to a report by Fatma Göksü in the Turkish newspaper Sabah, the party will open its serial congress on September 3 at a meeting of the Central Decision-Making and Administrative Committee in Ankara.
Instead of holding a series of provincial congress sessions over a whole year, the party will instead hold its major ordinary congress in February/March 2025 and conclude the sessions by spring next year, Sabah wrote.
In cities and districts with more than 100,000 inhabitants, congress sessions will be more inclusive. Delegates will be consulted, central elections will be held in the morning, and more comprehensive consultation sessions will be held in the afternoon.
The plan is to organize “Türkiye meetings,” which will serve as preparatory meetings for provincial and district congresses.
At the 23rd anniversary event earlier this week, AK Party chairman President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said the party was practicing “sincere self-criticism” and working “courageously and without inhibitions on our deficits.”
“This Congress will not be a mere accessory, but will be the foundation for the comprehensive change that our people expect from us,” he said.
He also urged those who “have lost their enthusiasm” not to “stand in the way of our people.”
He will attend the Congress sessions in Istanbul and Ankara.
The AK Party, which has the largest membership (more than 11 million according to last year’s figures), will first hold its congress sessions in small towns, later moving to districts and provinces, and concluding the party’s eighth ordinary congress with a final congress.
AK Party personnel will be reviewed and refreshed nationwide, while members will be deployed in all cities.
While the decision on the timing of the congress sessions will be made on September 3, the party began preparing for this change after the local elections on March 31. That was when the party suffered its first major defeat in the last two decades after winning several parliamentary and local elections in a row.
The AK Party won 380 city and district elections, while the main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), won in 372 municipalities. However, the opposition is considered victorious because it won in cities where the AK Party had received overwhelming support in the last election. The AK Party continues to hold a comfortable majority in parliament, and Erdoğan secured another four-year term last year despite the first runoff of his political career.
After the election, Erdoğan vowed to look inward and make “necessary changes” in the party. He stressed that they would not allow those who want to advance their own political careers to join the party. Instead, they would focus on winning the hearts of “new names that will give us power.” This month alone, the party replaced four more provincial leaders.
The party also plans to accept new members in the coming period. Erdoğan instructed his party officials not to “rush” the admission of new members. He also asked them to filter the applicants and only accept those who are willing to follow the party’s principles and values.
Sources in the AK Party say that registrations may also be possible next October.
Although the AK Party’s political landscape came into the spotlight in the year of its founding, groundbreaking moves by successive AK Party governments helped it stay in power for more than two decades. These included breaking several taboos on several issues such as the Kurdish question and a headscarf ban.
Over time, the organization faced accusations of closure and several coup attempts occurred. Erdoğan himself was banned from politics after being sentenced to ten months in prison for reciting a poem that the country’s ruling elite found offensive. In 1997, this brought down the coalition government of Erdoğan’s political mentor, Necmettin Erbakan.
This ban only ended in 2003 and he became the AK Party’s second prime minister after a short term under Abdullah Gül.
Since then, he has served either as prime minister or president, and is credited with building his party’s support among the general public through a series of civil service reforms.
