After coming to power in 2002, the AKP in Turkey took the country on a roller coaster from democratic reforms to authoritarian retreat. Starting off as a “conservative democratic” party with liberal tendencies, the AKP pivoted back to majoritarianism over the years. This chapter aims to make sense of this drastic shift and offers an account of the AKP’s swing from liberalism to electoralism. It discusses the AKP’s origins, its trajectory in government, and how it has taken a hegemonic direction despite its branding in its inception as a conservative party with an explicitly democratic agenda. To explain this transformation, the chapter identifies major forces inside the AKP, their diverging understandings of democracy, and describes how one wing prevailed over the other to take the party into a majoritarian direction. A key part of this process involves the rise of a dominant coalition under Tayyip Erdoğan’s leadership. His growing command over organizational resources weakened his rivals with more liberal democratic orientations. This chapter traces these processes and their political consequences for Turkish democracy, with specific focus on Erdoğan’s righteous majoritarianism.