Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has rejoined the ruling party that he co-founded, the first step in cementing his authority in the aftermath of a tight referendum victory that granted him sweeping new powers.

Erdoğan signed his membership form at a ceremony in the Justice and Development party (AKP) headquarters in the capital, Ankara, and is expected to be elected chair at an extraordinary congress later this month.

“Today, I return to the party that I founded: my home, my passion, my love,” he said.



Turkish voters narrowly approved a raft of constitutional amendments last month that will transform the country from a parliamentary democracy into a presidential republic.

The changes allow Erdoğan to run for office for two more terms, potentially governing as the head of a powerful executive until 2029. They remove key oversight powers from the legislature and abolish the role of prime minister.

They also give the president an obedient parliament filled with AKP cadres and near total control over the judiciary, cementing his hold over all branches of government.



Turkish presidents in the past were mandated to remain neutral, severing ties to political parties. The new constitutional amendments have eliminated this requirement, allowing the head of state to maintain party affiliation.

In reality, Erdoğan, the first popularly elected president, retained his influence over the AKP and their choice of parliamentary candidates as well as the direction of policy despite formally leaving the party in 2014.

At times he skirted constitutional norms by urging voters in parliamentary elections to elect politicians who would support his vision of a new constitution and presidential republic, essentially an endorsement of the AKP and its platform.

As the chair of the party, the president will maintain tighter control over the field of parliamentary candidates, ensuring his agenda will remain unchallenged if he wins the 2019 presidential elections and his party retains its majority in the legislature.

The constitutional reforms were paired with a crackdown on the political opposition and the media in Turkey. Key opposition leaders have been imprisoned or stripped of their parliamentary seats, and media outlets critical of the government have been shut down or taken over by agents loyal to Erdoğan.

About 150 media workers have been imprisoned, making Turkey the world’s biggest jailer of journalists.

The authorities have also purged the police, military, judiciary, bureaucracy and universities of tens of thousands of people accused of loyalty to Fethullah Gülen, an exiled US-based preacher whose movement is widely believed in Turkey to have orchestrated a failed coup attempt last July.

The repressive measures continued in the two weeks following the referendum, severing hopes that Erdoğan would seek to unify a divided nation in which the largest urban centres of Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir voted against his plan.

Over the weekend, Wikipedia was blocked in a widely condemned move, under a law designed to protect national security. Last week, Ankara also stoked renewed tensions with Syrian Kurdish militants backed by the United States, bombing their bases in Syria and Iraq without sufficient warning to the Washington-led coalition fighting Islamic State.

Turkey sees the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ party that is fighting an insurgency in Turkey itself, and its expansion along the southern border as a national security threat.