If you watch Turkish television you can’t escape Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister for the last 11 years, and now president-elect. Channel switching brings no relief. He is somehow always the man of the hour. Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, his main opponent in the recent presidential elections, complained sadly that state TV ran 553 minutes of Mr Erdogan’s campaign speeches, compared to three minutes of his.
During that campaign, Mr Erdogan, although there was never the slightest possibility he would lose, deployed all the advantages of incumbency without hesitation: direct or indirect control of most of the media, access to the financial resources of a business elite which has prospered under his rule, government transport, the support of stars and celebrities. He is not a man to ignore a sledgehammer, if there is one to hand. He is now giving more heavily televised speeches again, calling on the ruling Justice and Development party, or AKP, to work for a stronger parliamentary majority in general elections next year so that the constitution can be changed to create an executive presidency. The contradiction is that Mr Erdogan has been elected to a post to which the Turkish constitution assigns very limited powers. The president is supposed to be above party, there are ceremonial duties, and in certain political situations there is an expectation that he will be a neutral arbiter. This of course is not what he has in mind.
The same constitution also meant that he could not have another new term as prime minister so, like Mr Putin in a similar situation, he wants to take his powers with him. To be fair, he campaigned on that basis. The plan is to win enough seats in general elections next year, which must be held before June, to change the constitution, upgrading Mr Erdogan’s new job and downgrading that of whoever is the prime minister at the time of the change. In the interim, however, Mr Erdogan is not going to be wasting his time cutting ribbons on bridges.
He intends instead to exercise the president’s right, rarely used in the past, to call cabinet meetings and so maintain his grip on affairs. He will be, he says, an active president. Whether there is a reasonable argument that Turkey should move from a parliamentary to a presidential system has never been properly debated. This is not about the best constitutional arrangements for the country but about the best constitutional arrangements for Mr Erdogan. He has been the unchallenged boss of Turkish politics for 11 years, and he wants to continue in that role.
On the face of it, he should get his way. He controls the state apparatus, he has curbed the military and cowed the judiciary, and his friends in business and the media give him strong support. His appeal to a religiously and socially conservative constituency in rural areas or newly settled in the cities is undiminished. He brought that “new class” properly into politics, both aiding and benefiting from its fuller enfranchisement.
But now there is another new class. This is not the old secular elite of westernised Turks, although it includes them, but a wider and still amorphous liberal grouping which Mr Erdogan met and failed to vanquish, except in the immediate physical sense, during the protests over Gezi Park.
Nearly half of Turks did not vote for him in this last election, nor did they in the two elections before it. Mr Erdogan may well have hit his ceiling. This other Turkey is alienated by Mr Erdogan’s autocratic methods, alive to ecological issues, opposed to the over-development which is wrecking beautiful districts, dismayed by the AKP’s views on the role of women, and ashamed of the fact that Turkey is the world’s leading jailer of journalists.
It has yet to find a clear political expression but it will sooner or later do so. A leader of a different ilk than Mr Erdogan might have been able to meet it halfway. But all his instincts push him in the opposite direction. And that, in the end, may be his undoing.
