Cuneyt Ulsever: The end of the AKP rule?

For months, the AKP has been insisting that the "button has been pushed" against them by the opposition party ranks. It is as though they have just learned who this opposition is, as though they didn't understand that they had been voted in as the ruling party despite the presence of this opposition.
 
Beginning with the Prime Minister himself, and moving down to members of his ministerial cabinet, many members of the AKP are literally paranoid right now.
 
When you speak to Education Minister Huseyin Celik, he gives you the feeling that the President, in concert with the Consitutional Court, the State Council, and the Board of Education, have joined together in an alliance that has picked him as the target.

Everyone except for him is responsible for the fact that the Ministry of Education has not come up with any worthwhile projects in the last few years!
 
But it was when Justice Minister Cemil Cicek read out loud to the press a letter written in the guest book at Ataturk's birth home in Thessaloniki by an 82 year old Turkish citizen that I discovered what the most fundamental feeling at large is these days in the AKP: hopelessness!
 

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Even if they don't express it publicly, all AKP members can see that the government is in trouble on three different points:

1) The government is not creating projects or policies.
 
2) Including the Prime Minister, there are also many cabinet ministers who cannot handle running the country.
 
3) Even now, there is a struggle over power happening within the ranks of the AKP.

 
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The AKP administration is unable or unwilling to create projects and policies within its own framework.
 
In refusing my requests for answers to questions about the Leyla Sahin case which was argued in front of the European Court of Human Rights, the Prime Ministerial offices, which misdirected the handling of this significant "turban" case, accepted my allegations about their current inability to come up with new policy.

In other words, the administration is just trying to pacify those who are agitating for more rights for the "turban," but there are in fact no real efforts being made to find solutions.
 
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The same thing goes for the "imam hatip" or religious high schools for which the administration has promised to find a solution. "We want to find a way, but the regime does not allow this," they say.

They actually are not brave enough to battle the status quo on these two matters; despite the fact that they hold the power of the governmental majority for the past 3.5 years, they have been able to do nothing.
 
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The AKP has been using a typical populist strategy in its relations with its bedrock of supporters. While igoring corruption within party ranks at a local level, they put off IMF and EU requests, while gaining time in front of the conservative "national view" bedrock of supporters. The Prime Minister is turning into more and more of a nationalist, and while what he says in high level meetings with US officials is one thing, his anti-American stance in front of this bedrock is met with great support. Meanwhile, his use of religion as a political tool is at least on the level of the Erbakan administration of the mid 1990s.

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But there are two basic subjects on which the AKP has been unable to deliver in the past 3.5 years to its bedrock of voters: one is unemployment, and the other is poverty.
While previous administrations were finished off by corruption and poverty, it looks like this administration might be headed the same way. Tomorrow I will touch on weaknesses in the area of economics for this administration.