Turkey's Erdogan: Vaulting Ambitions

"Let's put our grievances and differences behind us. This is a new beginning," Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's new and first-ever publicly elected president, told a celebrating crowd from the balcony of his party's headquarters.

Erdogan told the crowd that his victory was not only a win for Turkey but also for Gaza, Beirut, Bagdad, Islamabad, Jerusalem and Sarajevo.

The former soccer player had spent most of the past few months campaigning in Turkey, including participating in a soccer match and scoring three goals in 15 minutes against a professional goalkeeper, and abroad hoping to gather as much vote as he could.

Erdogan gathered an average vote of 51.8 percent, about 20 million people, of the nearly 53 million voters who headed to the polls all across Turkey on Sunday. The other two candidates, opposition joint candidate Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu and the pro-Kurdish party candidate Selahattin Demirtas, got 38.5 percent and 9.8 percent, respectively.

Despite a highly polarized Turkey, voter turnout lingered around 73 percent. Some voters have boycotted the election process altogether.

“I didn’t vote as a protest. Ihsanoglu is close to Fethullah, I do not like Gulen,” Erman, who declined to provide his last name, tells Islamist Gate. Erman was referring to Fethullah Gulen, the United States-based Turkish Islamic scholar accused of trying to topple the government using his followers who hold influential government positions. “Demirtas only cares about the Kurds and Erdogan is a murderer,” he adds. 

Icten Ural, PhD candidate in political science, says the opposition now has no excuse after the successive wins of Erdogan and his party in several elections over the past 12 years.

“The opposition kept insisting on anti-Erdogan election campaign without any appealing policy resolution in major political issues. For example, the slogan for İhsanoğlu 'Ekmek için Ekmeleddin- Ekmeleddin for Bread' sounds good and easily recallable but it is not appealing for ordinary Anatolian people who seek socio-economic upgrading,” says Ural.  

Erdogan’s new victory could be seen as yet another sign of the opposition’s failure in appealing to the Turkish people.

Now there are calls on the opposition parties to introduce new tactics and evolve into more dynamic and young-oriented parties that could one day compete with AK party’s allure.

Within opposition circles Aykan Erdemir, a young Turkish MP from Bursa for the Republican’s People’s Party (CHP) tweeted: “In Turkey, men over 40 comprise ¼ of the electorate, but 5/6 of the parliament. Patriarchal gerontocracy is Turkey’s biggest problem.”

While his supporters cheered the much-expected victory, many across Turkey, mainly the other 30 million Turks who did not vote for Erdogan and the other 20 million nonvoters seemed to question the intentions of the president-elect.

The Turkish premier has repeatedly indicated that he was seeking to implement a presidential system in Turkey that would see a powerful president with vast authorities, similar to that in the United States, instead of the current parliamentary system.

Erdogan’s ambitions were never realized as his party never managed to gain the two-third majority in parliament that would allow him to rewrite the constitution. 

However, all the buzz in Ankara is about knowing who will replace Erdogan in the prime ministry more than what Erdogan has in mind for his five-year-long presidency.

One day after his win, Erdogan chaired a meeting of the party's highest decision-making board, the first step in a process that will culminate with the naming of his replacement as prime minister once he is inaugurated as president on Aug. 28.

Many point to the fact that Erdogan’s Justice and Development party, known as the AK Party, might appoint the current foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, as the new prime minister, a faithful Erdogan ally and one who, unlike many in the party, will not have to worry about the AK party’s three-term limit bylaw, thus can continue being a prime minister for three terms.

Adding to the heated speculations, outgoing President Abdullah Gul announced on August 11, the day following the elections, that he was going to rejoin the AK Party.

“I am one of the founders, the first prime minister and president from the party, it is only normal that I would return to my party.” While it is normal, this declaration was off the table as few months ago Gul announced that he would be leaving politics.

“I certainly think that Gul's decision wasn't sudden, at the same time, once PM Erdogan only got 51.8% as opposed to expectations of over 55% to %60 of the vote, this helped Gul to assert himself more easily,” Ilhan Tanir, Turkish journalist and political analyst, tells Islamist Gate. “We might see some kind of summit between the two to solve some obvious disagreements.”

Many saw that Gul’s earlier comments about quitting politics as an indication for a conflict between the two main founders of the AK party over the real role of the prime minister, assuming Gul would take the job, once Erdogan became president.

By stating his wishes to come back to the party, Tanir said, Gul also expressed his demand for the prime minister job.

“However, as we just heard, Erdogan decided to convene the party congress on the 27th, a day before Gul's presidency finishes. Will Gul resign earlier to be eligible to become head of the party? I think we will see in the next few days how the infighting within party will unfold. Some of core "Erdoganists" don't want Gul.”

Gul had frequently shown that his idea of democracy and governing was different than Erdogan’s. Gul came out against the social media bans introduced earlier this year. He also displayed better inclusiveness during last year’s Gezi protests.

However, some fear that this was a “good cop, bad cop” strategy that Erdogan is planning to implement yet again once in the presidency office. “Erdogan will push for a Putin type governance and Medvedev type prime minister,” Ural argued.

While the future for Turkey could seem uncertain, most observers agree on one thing: neither Erdogan nor his party have a viable alternative so far that could keep Turkey on the same prosperous and relatively more liberal path it has been following over the last decade.