In an interview with BBC Türkçe, Gül divided the AK Party’s history into two sharply different periods and pointed to the extraordinary events that shaped its later years, including the 2016 coup attempt. Although he declined to comment directly on current political disputes, his remarks offered a sombre assessment of the party’s transformation after its early years in power.
The AK Party is marking its 25th anniversary this year. Gül, one of its leading founders, recalled that the movement emerged from a bitter split within the Virtue Party, the successor to the Welfare Party, which had been closed by Turkey’s Constitutional Court in 1998.
The Virtue Party itself faced a closure case and held a leadership congress in May 2000. Two factions emerged: the “Traditionalists”, linked to the movement’s established leadership, and the “Innovators”, who included Gül, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Bülent Arınç and Abdüllatif Şener.
Gül challenged Recai Kutan, the candidate supported by the movement’s founder, Necmettin Erbakan. Kutan won by 112 votes, but Gül said the contest represented an unprecedented democratic struggle within a movement that had rarely experienced open internal competition.
The Innovators argued that the party had to abandon ideological rhetoric and become more contemporary, accessible and politically credible. They promoted democracy, the rule of law and fundamental human rights, while seeking to restore public confidence through concrete policies.
After the Virtue Party was closed in 2001, the Traditionalists formed the Felicity Party. Erdoğan and the Innovators, meanwhile, began preparing a new political organisation. The AK Party was formally established on August 14, 2001.
According to Gül, its founding programme was the result of extensive consultations involving politicians, economists, legal experts and academics. The group prepared an “emergency action plan” covering legal, economic, financial, health and administrative policies, allowing it to claim that it was ready to govern immediately after taking office.
The party presented itself as “conservative democratic”, a political identity its founders deliberately selected as they sought to distance the new organisation from the more explicitly ideological traditions of the National Outlook movement.
The AK Party won the 2002 general election. Because Erdoğan was temporarily barred from political office, Gül served as prime minister for approximately four months before Erdoğan succeeded him following a legal amendment.
Gül later served as foreign minister, deputy prime minister and president, leaving office in 2014. He has remained outside active politics since then.
In the BBC Türkçe interview, Gül suggested that the political traumas of recent years must be overcome if Turkey is to recover the principles associated with the AK Party’s original programme. His appeal for a return to that vision carried an implicit warning: the party that once promised democratic renewal, he indicated, may now be dangerously distant from the ideals that brought it to power.