Journalist and author Murat Yetkin stated that the March 31 local elections made the problems within the AKP visible, writing: "The prevailing view within the AK Party was that it would conduct its March 31 reckoning and continue on its path. That did not happen. Erdoğan stepped outside his own routine. He spread the solution to the problem over time. He extended the reckoning to the Congress process. This situation has begun to accumulate a tension of anticipation from the top down within the AK Party's management levels."
"LOYALTY TO THE LEADER, NOT THE CAUSE, HAD BECOME ESSENTIAL"
Noting that the AKP has begun to be perceived as a party of those who enriched themselves while in power and engaged in displays of waste and ostentation, of appointees who wag their fingers at elected officials, and of those who created their own ruling elite class, Yetkin stated: "Following the process of Erdoğan being elected President for the first time in 2014, and the subsequent purges of first Abdullah Gül and then Ahmet Davutoğlu, the AK Party had assumed an identity where loyalty to the 'leader' rather than the 'cause' was essential. After the March 31 defeat, was the party perhaps starting to show reflexes like a party, and was that why Erdoğan wanted to spread the process over time? However, it seems that as this accounting is delayed, the pain will only increase."
News Source: 12punto
