Threat or Opportunity? Turkey's Democratisation Process Under the Justice and Development Party (JDP) 2002-2014

Democratisation has become an aspirational phenomenon in many parts of the world. This paper analyses the role of JDP in Turkey’s current democratisation process. Critics argue that the JDP, though professing to be a conservative democratic party, is in fact a fundamentalist Islamic party with a hidden agenda to establish a Sharia-based regime in Turkey. This argument raises a number of questions: • Can a pro-EU party like the JDP have an Islamist hidden agenda? Is the ‘hidden agenda’ hypothesis real or imagined? • How would we explain the increasing public support for the JDP and the genuine democratisation reforms led by it? • Could Conservative Democracy, the political identity of the JDP, be regarded as an appropriate political approach for Turkey? Regardless of the point of view we take to answer these questions, there remains a grey zone, which the writer of this paper will attempt to clarify.