After 11 years in power, deep rifts are appearing within Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). Party leader and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has drawn criticism from senior AKP figures after pledging to ban mixed-sex student housing, a move designed to please conservative voters. Some pundits say the dissent is a sign that Erdogan may have passed the peak of his power. But the prime minister’s advisers stress that Erdogan’s political instincts are as sound as ever and that their boss has once again read the mind of the conservative public correctly ahead of key local elections in March.

Erdogan, who founded the AKP in 2001, has made his party more successful than any other political group since the introduction of multi-party elections in Turkey in the 1940s. Under Erdogan, the AKP has won three consecutive national elections and two local elections, and has sent its co-founder, former Prime Minister Abdullah Gul, into the presidential palace as head of state. According to figures recently released by Turkey’s judiciary, the AKP has eight times as many members as the biggest opposition group, the secularist Republican People’s Party (CHP), with 8 million versus 1 million.

At 59, the prime minister is the undisputed leader of the AKP, and the party is careful to project an image of a unified political force. But that image has taken several hits recently. When the Gezi Park protests erupted in early June, government spokesman and Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc, standing in for Erdogan during a foreign visit by the prime minister, apologized for police brutality. Upon his return to Turkey several days later, Erdogan dismissed Arinc’s efforts to de-escalate the situation, choosing a hard-line position instead.

Last week, Arinc, a co-founder of the AKP and one of the most powerful men in the party, was at odds with the prime minister again. After the Zaman newspaper quoted Erdogan as telling attendees of a closed-door meeting that his government would act to prevent unmarried female and male university students from living together, Arinc flatly denied the report, only to see Erdogan confirm it the next day. Arinc decided to vent his anger and went on state television to say he would not be anyone’s “sandbag.”