May 19, 2016

Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) declared its new chairman on May 19: Transportation, Maritime Affairs and Communications Minister Binali Yildirim. Party delegates still need to "elect" Yildirim to the position May 22, but that is only a formality. Once he becomes party chairman, Yildirim will form a new Cabinet, get President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's approval and begin his job as Turkey's new prime minister early next week.

So who is Binali Yildirim? Born in the conservative eastern Anatolian town of Refahiye in 1955, Yildirim is a maritime engineer by training. He worked many years in various public transportation companies before entering politics with the AKP in 2001. From 2002 to 2014, Yildirim served as the transportation minister and cultivated an image as a successful builder of major projects, including new highways, high-speed trains, tunnels, airports and bridges. The public knew him as the minister wearing a hard hat.

What made the AKP's star transportation minister even more significant, however, has been his increasingly close relationship with Erdogan. When Yildirim reached the end of the AKP's three-term limit in 2014, Erdogan did not let him go. Yildirim first ran for mayor in Izmir, but failed to win in that resolutely secular city. Then Erdogan appointed him as one of his advisers — and, as many people believed, kept him as "backup" against Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu.

In 2015, Yildirim again entered the Cabinet as the minister of transportation, maritime affairs and communications. Three months ago, people who know Ankara well were already hearing rumors that Erdogan was growing unhappy with Davutoglu, and would replace him with Yildirim — which turned out to be the case.

But why did Erdogan actually replace Davutoglu with Yildirim? The simple answer is that Davutoglu did not prove to be loyal and obedient enough. As exposed in the mysterious blog that triggered Davutoglu's resignation, the president and the prime minister had their differences — not huge gaps, but nuances — on issues such as freedom of speech, relations with the West and rule of law. Davutoglu, after all, was a former professor of politics and a self-confident intellectual, who had his own views on Turkey's political matters. He also had a charisma of his own, with a small but notable band of "Davutoglu-ists," which included some of the more bookish and worldly figures in the AKP universe.