The AKP, which has been in power for the longest uninterrupted period in Turkey's democratic history, is losing blood and is looking for a remedy.
It also seems difficult to find a cure.
Because with every move the AKP makes to maintain its power, it accelerates its own demise.
There are many different readings of the AKP's emergence on the political scene.
From the search for a ‘suitable’ partner in Turkey for the US plan to invade Iraq to the need for a strong one-party government to implement the Kemal Derviş program, there were many factors that helped the AKP to come to power immediately after its establishment.
However, despite all this, the AKP emerged on the political scene as an address that the nation turned to in order to respond to the state's ‘I know what I know’ approach with ‘I am here too’.
In the first years of its rule, it remained on the stage as a party that produced politics and secured its legitimacy through popular support.
However, while he was under the illusion that he had gained power with his position of ’siding with the state against the nation‘, a position to which he had been drawn by MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli himself on June 7, 2015, he did not even realize that he had actually lost his greatest power.
It has been in power ever since, but it has never managed to become a political party in power.
The fact that many AKP supporters today wag their fingers at their interlocutors ‘in the name of the state’ on talk shows or in their writings is precisely the result of the path they took that day.
This group, which is trying to bring their opponents to their knees with ‘very important’ information they claim to have received from some secret places in the state, is well aware of where they actually get their power from.
Although they seem to lean their backs on the AKP, they are not at all bothered by creating the impression that they speak ‘on behalf of the state’. On the contrary, they seem to secretly enjoy producing consent through force and fear.
Some ‘state apparatuses’ that have joined the AKP over time must be quite happy with this situation. However, some circles who call themselves ‘we are not AKP supporters, we are AK Party members’ take great care not to raise their voices against these ‘mighty statesmen’.
This situation is rapidly distancing the AKP from its image as a party that generates consent through politics.
The AKP, which has lost its ability to produce consent by producing pacification, seems to have preferred the ease of doing business by taking the ‘stick of the state’ instead of the carrot.
The AKP was given ample time to demilitarize the country and expand the scope of politics, but it used this time to keep the official institutions intact and take them over.
For example, it did not touch the institutions of the new established order established on September 12.
He even became the staunchest defender of the Diyanet, which he once said should be shut down!
In this new position, the AKP, which is gradually losing popular support, has preferred to ‘criminalize the opposition’ instead of developing new policies to prevent interest in the opposition.
By targeting everything from the main opposition party's congress to its municipalities, he is trying to reinforce the perception that ‘they are not clean either’.
In this effort to prevent voters from turning to the opposition, he does not even realize that he is actually destroying the public's trust in the political institution.
The political scene, which he is trying to design with the help of the judiciary, law enforcement and intelligence, is gradually slipping out from under his feet. Yes, for today, he may be preventing the masses who have given up on him from turning to the opposition with this tactic. However, he does not take into account that in the medium to long term, when the masses give up on politics, the establishment may pull a rabbit out of a hat. Or he seems to have forgotten how he came to power.
Having lost political power, the AKP's countermeasure is not to poison and criminalize the political institution. It is to transform into a party that produces politics again.
But is it possible for him to do this with today's party elites and cadres who adjust the nation with the mouthpiece of the state?
That seems very difficult.