Since 1970, political parties of the Islamist National Outlook Movement have been integrated into political processes of Turkey’s electoral democracy, but, an innovative outspan of it, the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) has been the most successful of them. Since its first election into the government in 2002, the AKP has established electoral predominance and accumulated enough power to redefine Turkey’s identity. With this track record, the AKP has shown how competent and skilled politicians can Islamist be, and arguably set the new standards of success for other Islamist political parties that engage in electoral processes elsewhere in the Muslim world. The political practice of the AKP, however, gave two almost diametrically opposing messages. Initially, the AKP’s success rested on showing that it is not a reincarnation of its Islamist ancestor, but a new “conservative democratic” political force that embraces the universal principles of rule of law, human rights and pluralism, adopts a pro-Western outlook, supports Turkey’s EU-membership bid, and, if necessary, postpones taking up the problems of Islamic identity so as not to provoke fears of Islamization. As such, the AKP has appeared as an “Islamic liberal” or “post-Islamist” political force, generating optimism for a reconciliation of secularism/Islam with democracy and thereby falsification of the well-established Orientalist paradigm that denies the possibility of a fully-fledged democracy in Muslim majority countries. This optimism however has faded away as the AKP gained a foothold in Turkey’s power structure and started to adopt a dismissive attitude towards democratic opposition, concentrate power in its hands, normalize Islamism instead of liberalizing secularism and deploy the Islamic moralist language of “forbidding evil, commanding good” to legitimize its “instructive” policies. With this political practice the AKP proved the Orientalist essentialism right in claiming that Islamist can never be fully committed to democracy. This paper seeks to understand and explain the reasons for the AKP’s Islamist and authoritarian turn. It discusses the reasons why the flexibility and pragmatism dictated by the imperative of electoral competition did not result in the emergence of a substantive definition of Muslim democracy, and why behavioral moderation did not lead to ideological one. The paper suggests four possible factors accounting for the AKP’s de-moderation: the institutional/political context of the AKP’s behavioral moderation, the AKP’s interaction with the secular actors, the AKP’s internal party structure, and the impact of the changing international context.