A senior official from Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) resigned after acknowledging on live television that the party had cooperated with the Gülen movement in the bureaucracy during its early years in power.
Emre Cemil Ayvalı, deputy chair of the AKP’s publicity and media department, made the remarks on Tarafsız Bölge, a CNN Türk program hosted by Ahmet Hakan.
The discussion focused on the “political leg” of Turkey’s July 15, 2016 coup attempt, a phrase used in Turkey to question whether politicians also bear responsibility for the state structures Ankara later blamed for the failed coup.
Ayvalı argued that the AKP had faced an entrenched Kemalist bureaucracy after coming to power in 2002 and had used the Gülen movement, a transnational civic initiative inspired by Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, to gain room inside the state.
“I came to power in 2002, and now it is 2007 or 2008,” Ayvalı said. “To appoint one undersecretary, I need this person to have completed 12 years as a director general.”
“I am saying this openly,” he continued. “On one side there was the coup-prone Kemalist tradition, and on the other side there was the Gülen movement. We had to make them clash with each other in order to move forward. That is the whole story.”
His comments drew criticism because President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government has blamed the movement for the coup attempt and has pursued broad criminal investigations against people accused of links to it.
Ankara designates the Gülen movement as a terrorist organization and blames it for Turkey’s 2016 coup attempt. The movement denies involvement in the coup or any terrorist activity.
Ayvalı later announced his resignation from the AKP post.
He wrote on social media that he was stepping down to prevent harm to his party, while arguing that his comments had been taken out of context.
