The Justice and Development Party (AK Party), in power since 2002, secured another seat in the Parliament when opposition Good Party’s (IP) lawmaker Kürşad Zorlu joined it last week. Zorlu’s switch boosted the party’s parliamentary standing after losing several seats after the 2023 general elections.
In one and a half years, the AK Party managed to increase the number of seats in the Parliament to 269 from the 268 seats it won in the legislative vote despite losing many lawmakers.
The party has nominated five lawmakers from the Free Cause Party (HÜDA-PAR) and Democratic Left Party (DSP) as AK Party candidates in the 2023 elections, as those parties endorsed the AK Party-led People’s Alliance for the presidential election. Those lawmakers switched back to their parties after the elections. The party lost another seat when Murat Kurum left the Parliament as he took up the post of Minister of Environment, Urban Planning and Climate Change in July 2024. Since then, however, seven lawmakers from the opposition joined the AK Party, including five from IP, one from the New Welfare Party (YRP), and one from the Future Party (GP). IP, meanwhile, suffered a heavy loss compared to the 43 seats it won in the 2023 elections in the past one and a half years. Along with Zorlu, 14 lawmakers quit the party, either joining the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) or continuing to serve as independent members of the Parliament.
The latest official figures also show that the AK Party retains the highest number of members since it came to power two decades ago. The party is one of 168 officially registered by the General Prosecution Office of the Supreme Court of Appeal.
The AK Party has more than 11.1 million members, ahead of its main rival, CHP, which has more than 1.5 million members.
The party will mark its 24th year in the political scene this year. Though the political landscape in the year it was founded propelled the AK Party to the spotlight, landmark steps by successive AK Party governments helped it to stay in power for more than two decades. Those include breaking the taboo on several issues, such as the so-called Kurdish question and a headscarf ban. Along the way, it faced lawsuits for its closure and several coup attempts. Its chair and current President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan himself was barred from politics after he was imprisoned for 10 months for reciting a poem deemed offensive for the country’s ruling elite, which toppled a coalition government of Erdoğan’s political mentor Necmettin Erbakan in 1997. This ban only ended in 2003, and he became the second prime minister of the AK Party after a brief tenure by Abdullah Gül. Since then, he has served either as prime minister or president and is credited with expanding his party’s support to the wider public through a string of reforms in public services. The party was first challenged to remain in power in the 2004 local elections. However, the sweeping social change that brought the AK Party to power as the voice of the previously unheard masses also brought its first municipal election victory. With a vote rate of 41.7%, the AK Party won seats in 1,765 municipalities. In the next general election, it further cemented its success by winning more than 46% of the vote. The successive elections were almost a carbon copy of each other for the AK Party in terms of the high vote rate, despite fluctuations at times.