Erdoğan's dilemma on the AKP's anniversary

Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Parti) celebrates its 16th anniversary in Ankara today, Aug. 14.

I was there when the party was founded by former Istanbul mayor Tayyip Erdoğan as an offspring of the Islamic-conservative Milli Görüş movement led by Necmettin Erbakan.

One of the men among the party founders particularly drew my attention. As a political journalist, I already knew most of the faces of the founders. I had known Abdullah Gül for many years as Erbakan's foreign policy voice and I knew Bülent Arınç as a stubborn lawyer and parliamentary spokesperson. I also knew Hüseyin Çelik, who joined the AK Parti from the center-right True Part Party (DYP), and seasoned diplomat Yaşar Yakış. 

But I did not know the young man with a shy smile on his face, Ali Babacan, who was announced as being the AK Parti member responsible for economic policy. I remember thinking that none of the parties in the fragile three-party coalition trying to cope with a heavy economic crisis had such young people in their executive bodies.

Voters showed boldly in the November 2002 election that they had no confidence left in any of the five parties at parliament. They opted to elect the newly founded AK Parti as the government, with the Republican People's Party (CHP) as the opposition, (after the latter was punished and left out of parliament in the 1999 election).

Babacan became treasury minister and continued the ambitious financial program of Kemal Derviş, an international economist who was invited to Turkey by the previous government to save the country from the economic crisis. It worked.

The success of the AK Parti was in its difference from Erbakan's line, particularly related in two main points:

1)For...