During Sept. 12-13, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) held its annual convention at a gigantic hall in Ankara. It was the first convention at which the party’s “eternal leader,” Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was not physically present, because he is, technically speaking, a “nonpartisan president,” according to the Turkish Constitution. Yet in fact, the spirit of Erdogan was everywhere, putting its mark on the party more decidedly than ever. As a result, some key AKP veterans who dared at times to disagree with Erdogan and are viewed by some outside the party as “moderates” were excluded from the party’s decision-making central committee. Meanwhile, hawks and loyalists received promotions.

The convention is something that the AKP, like other Turkish parties, holds every year, bringing together more than 1,000 delegates from across Turkey to elect a party chair and central committee. In the AKP, the latter consists of 50 members who meet routinely to determine policy. In reality, however, the system works in a more top-down than bottom-up manner. In other words, the delegates and the central committee do little more than endorse the decisions of the party leader.

This year, with Erdogan looming large as eternal leader, it was taken for granted that the current prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, would be re-elected party chairman. A few days before the convention, however, stories leaked to the media about tension between Davutoglu and Erdogan and the president having a “Plan B,” which called for blessing one of his loyalists, former Transportation Minister Binali Yildirim, as the new party chair. Davutoglu had reportedly compiled a list of names for the central committee, but Erdogan did not like it and therefore proposed his own. When Davutoglu resisted, Erdogan’s men had some 900 delegates sign a blank sheet of paper, putting them at the ready to support Yildirim should Erdogan give the sign. Davutoglu backed down at the last minute. In the end, Erdogan’s list was approved, and crisis was averted. The central committee shaped by Erdogan conspicuously lacks a number of key people whom Davutoglu had planned to keep on his team.

Bulent Arinc is one of the AKP's three founding pillars, along with Erdogan and Abdullah Gul. Arinc has been a voice of moderation and balance in the party for years. Some of his conservative statements on women’s role in society rightly angered feminists. Besides that, however, he opposed the witch hunt for secularists during the AKP's second term, opposed Erdogan’s hawkish stance against the Gezi Park protesters in 2013 and more recently dared to criticize Erdogan for violating the constitution and pushing for one-man rule. “We were a party of ‘us,’” Arinc said in a much-referenced interview published Sept. 11, “but now we have turned into a party of ‘me.’”