After coming to power in 2002, the AKP in Turkey took the country on a roller coaster from democratic reforms to authoritarian retreat. Starting off as a “conservative democratic” party with liberal tendencies, the AKP pivoted back to majoritarianism over the years. This chapter aims to make sense of this drastic shift and offers an account of the AKP’s swing from liberalism to electoralism. It discusses the AKP’s origins, its trajectory in government, and how it has taken a hegemonic direction despite its branding in its inception as a conservative party with an explicitly democratic agenda. To explain this transformation, the chapter identifies major forces inside the AKP, their diverging understandings of democracy, and describes how one wing prevailed over the other to take the party into a majoritarian direction. A key part of this process involves the rise of a dominant coalition under Tayyip Erdoğan’s leadership. His growing command over organizational resources weakened his rivals with more liberal democratic orientations. This chapter traces these processes and their political consequences for Turkish democracy, with specific focus on Erdoğan’s righteous majoritarianism.

Part I is about the social origins of people who became fixers in 2010s Turkey and Syria. Some were refugees from Syria’s civil war or journalists ousted from Turkey’s domestic press as the Turkish state successively captured opposition outlets; these prospective fixers turned to work with the international media for the promise of stability. Others came from non-journalism backgrounds but, inspired by developments such as Turkey’s “Kurdish Opening” or the 2013 Gezi Park protest movement, found in fixing the opportunity to pursue adventurous and idealistic aspirations. Fixers of different backgrounds help foreign reporters in different ways: some provide insider access to local events and people, while others help their clients to make sense of phenomena from an outsider perspective.

Turkish politics illustrates the complex relationships among populism, democracy, and human rights. Throughout the twentieth century, an urban, secularist elite largely monopolized government power and used it to modernize society against the will of much of the population. The Justice and Development Party (AKP) has reversed this pattern since it took power in 2002. Its leader, now-President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is a paradigmatic populist: a charismatic leader who portrays politics as a Manichean competition between the virtuous people and a domineering elite, and his policy agenda as embodying a homogeneous popular will. The AKP has neutered the Kemalist military, bureaucracy, and judiciary, and has implemented policies favored by its once-marginalized supporters. But Erdogan's successive purges of internal rivals have bolstered the critique that he, like many populists, merely uses citizen supporters to legitimate his rule and policy preferences, rather than genuinely representing them. Since 2013, his government has harshly repressed real and perceived opponents, jailing tens of thousands, while portraying them as enemies of the people – another classic antidemocratic populist habit.