Turkey: Swinging Pendulum Away from the European Union, 2005-2022

The past 22 years in Turkey can be divided into two sub-periods: during the 2002–10 period, the first AKP era, the party was broadly positioned as a moderate Islamist party with a clear intent to revive the failing economy of the country. The Turkish economy, in terms of mainstream standard criteria used by international organizations like the IMF, improved significantly during this period, in particular until the global financial crisis of 2008, through liberalization and reinforcing the country’s EU candidacy bid through a series of economic and democratic reforms. The second period, from 2009–11, and particularly from 2013 onwards, marked the second AKP era, which was defined by serious economic problems and an explicit authoritarian shift. The country’s political and institutional environment experienced serious backward steps in terms of both economic reform and democratization during this second decade of the AKP regime. Several significant incidents marked the increasingly authoritarian style of the regime: the Gezi protests of the summer of 2013, the intra-Islamist split between AKP and the Gülen movement in late 2013, the presidential election of 2014, and the failed coup attempt of July 2016 and the harsh authoritarian reaction that followed. Although it was still possible to label Turkey a flawed or illiberal democracy before mid-2015, the developments since the June 2015 elections and particularly after the July 2016 coup attempt (and counter-offensive) have led more observers to opt for sub-categories of authoritarianism instead.