The corruption charges against the Justice and Development Party (AKP) will occupy center stage in the upcoming municipal elections scheduled for March 30. Rather than focusing on his party’s accomplishments in municipal services over the past 10 years, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has chosen to devote his energy to defending himself against widespread corruption charges. Yet, the origins of the AKP’s electoral success in the last 10 years lie in its record of municipal politics.
AKP municipalities have been consistent in delivering municipal services that focus on citizens and in improving much-needed infrastructure to modernize decaying cities. The AKP’s success at the municipal level reinforced the party’s claim that it can deliver more than simple Islamist ideology and govern cities in a competent and responsible manner. However, the AKP’s record in municipal politics has, from the beginning, been defined by two contradictory tendencies: large-scale infrastructure projects coupled with urban transformation plans on the one hand, and on the other a commitment to conservative values that goes back to the Ottoman social fabric of historical Turkish cities.
In recent years, these two priorities have become increasingly contradictory and unsustainable as the AKP municipalities have ramped up their construction projects and extended boundaries of urban transformation programs. The result is not only widespread local discontent — which erupted in the Gezi Park protests in June 2013 — but also utter disregard for conservative values that were supposed to provide the spiritual background to the AKP’s municipal vision.
Urban life developed over the course of the Ottoman administration received special attention from renowned conservative writers and intellectuals. The AKP leadership and cadres regularly pay lip service to these intellectuals and their works to appeal to the party's electoral base, yet the AKP also consistently fails to internalize the unique quality of this intellectual tradition, which tried to distill a sophisticated urban local culture infused with Ottoman custom.
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