On Aug. 27, Turkey’s incumbent Justice and Development Party (AKP) held its major congress and elected its new leader after the ascendance of Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the presidency: Ahmet Davutoglu. At the same event, Davutoglu gave a long address to thousands of party members in the hall, and millions of Turks on TV, outlining his vision for the future. He promised nine “restorations” regarding various issues in domestic and foreign policy — such as restoring justice, fighting corruption and drafting a new constitution. The “restoration” that made most sense to many observers, however, was related to the economy.
Davutoglu said, “The Turkish economy was in ruins in 2001 [right before the AKP]. A country then seen as a sick man realized an economic revolution. The road from the sick man of 2001 to the strong economy of today was made possible by a rational economic policy.”
The term “rational economic policy” was meaningful, because in the past two years, the observers of the AKP have increasingly noted a rift within the party. The first came being the “rational” camp led by Minister of Economy Ali Babacan, Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek and the head of the central bank, Erdem Basci, a key bureaucrat. The “ideological” camp, on the other hand, was led by Numan Kurtulmus, deputy chairman of AKP and the former the leader of the short-lived Has Party, which was defined as the voice of the “Islamic left.” On a less serious level there was also Yigit Bulut, a former newspaper columnist who Erdogan appointed as his adviser in 2013.
The first camp insisted on keeping up with the liberal, globalist, market-friendly economic policies that Turkey implemented once the AKP came to power. (And, in fact, inherited from the key economic reforms realized right before the AKP’s ascendance by Kemal Dervis, a former World Bank official and former head of the UNDP.) In this view, Turkey was successful due to integration with the world, welcoming foreign investment and refraining from populist economic policies that could infringe on “financial discipline.”
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