Steven A. Cook is the Hasib J. Sabbagh senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Without fail every year, starting around November 10, my #Turkey Twitter feed is jammed with not just the latest news from Ankara and Istanbul, but also Auntie Jean’s turkey recipe and suggestions about how to deep fry the bird without blowing up your house. And every year, on behalf of Turks and Turkey scholars the world over, I plaintively ask the tweeting masses to change #Turkey to #Turkiye, the actual Turkish name for the country that borders Greece, Bulgaria, Iran, Iraq and Syria—alas, with no success.

This year, however, basting and brining be damned, I am not going to make my annual plea. In an odd sort of way, #Turkey and #Turkiye have come together for me. That’s because after a mere 90 days as president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has become the man who has eaten Turkey—the country. He is president and de facto prime minister, making him Turkey’s first “Primesident”—sort of like the political version of Turducken. Yet Erdogan’s powers run even further and deeper. He is also, effectively, the country’s foreign minister and chief judge, a prosecutor and big city mayor, university rector and father figure. There is nothing that better represents how Erdogan has gorged on Turkey than the president’s own newly unveiled Ak Saray, or White Palace, with its $350-$650 million price tag, 1,000 rooms and more than 2 million square feet.


Erdogan was, of course, larger than life before he took the presidential oath of office in August. Since 2007, when then-Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul—the only other adult in the room—became president, Erdogan has been the only person who has really mattered in the Turkish political arena. As prime minister for more than a decade, he achieved this mastery through his finely honed political skills, the incompetence of an out-of-touch and craven opposition, political coercion and fear. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) went from one of the most interesting “post-Islamist” political parties in the Muslim world to little more than a hive of sycophants who elided Turkey’s interests and those of the party into the man’s ambitions. In the process, the party has become more hardline in its role as the vehicle for Erdogan’s authoritarian and even retrograde turn. At a recent conference on women’s rights, Erdogan declared, “You cannot put women and men on equal footing. It is against nature.” This was shocking, even for Erdogan who wondered last summer what Americans knew of Hitler and more recently asserted that Muslims discovered America.

By Erdogan’s third term as prime minister, which began in the summer of 2011, the AKP had stuffed Turkey with copious amounts of patronage, making it practically impossible for anyone to mount a challenge to the man. The process of reinforcing Erdogan’s predominance was fairly straightforward: Erdogan encouraged big businesses that wanted lucrative government contracts—mostly in construction—to buy up media outlets, and , in return for good coverage of the government, the lira would flow. Those who refused to play the game were hounded, sued and fined, often exorbitant amounts. The most famous example of this was the $2.5 billion tax fine levied on the Dogan media group, whose owners, editors and journalists refused to be intimidated by Erdogan and the AKP.

This is not to downplay Erdogan’s achievements. He has certainly broadened Turkish politics to include classes that the previous elite had little interest in, and provided them with health care, better infrastructure and improved transportation. Turks have also felt wealthier since the AKP came to power, thanks to economic growth and the availability of consumer credit. Erdogan was also highly regarded in Washington, which considered his pious politics in an officially secular political order a Muslim “third way” that was an example to Arab countries. The European Union even rewarded Turkey with an official invitation to begin membership negotiation after Erdogan oversaw wide-ranging political reforms in 2003-2004.

But Erdogan has rolled back many of these liberalizing changes, using the state at his command to crack down on dissent, intimidate his opponents and—perhaps above all—enrich and empower himself. For all his political dominance, as prime minister he was still just the head of government, not the head of state. When, after three terms, the AKP’s bylaws prevented him from standing for another election in the Grand National Assembly, he was faced with the dilemma of how to finish his grand project of establishing Turkey as a regional and economic power.

By that point, Erdogan’s revolution of sorts was only partially complete. He had silenced the Turkish General Staff (the equivalent of the U.S. Joint Chiefs), forged a new “pious” political class and brought the old secular one to heel in the process. And policymakers in the United States, in particular, came to regard Turkey as a rising power. Missing from this was a new constitution that would institutionalize these changes and finally bring an end to Kemalism—a set of ideas that had led to repressive governance in Turkey for the preceding 90 years. The only way to finish what Erdogan had begun was to move to the Turkish presidency, a position that he was believed to have coveted from the start of his political career.

Erdogan had a problem with the powers of the Turkish presidency, though. They are formally non-political and limited in scope in comparison to those of the prime minister. Some of Erdogan’s opponents believed—hoped—that because the balance of power favors the prime ministry, his move to the presidency would serve as a straightjacket, rendering the man who had run Turkey for more than a decade a boisterous, but relatively marginal, political figure.

It was a nice thought, but Erdogan is a shrewd politician. As early as 2007 and again between 2011 and 2013, he pushed hard to replace the constitution written at the behest of the military in the early 1980s. The latter push for a new document was consciously intended to establish an “executive presidency” so that Erdogan could take the powers of the prime minister with him to the presidency. In a rarity for Erdogan, he failed, but it turned out not to matter. As president, Erdogan still wants a new constitution to finish the work that he began when he came to office, even though, in terms of his own power and prestige, he does not need it. He is dispensing with the prudence of past Turkish presidents and leveraging powers that they had at their disposal but thought better not to use in order to maintain the political standards of the office. Beginning next year, for example, Erdogan will chair cabinet meetings, shunting aside Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, whose profile diminished considerably when he was promoted from foreign minister.

In fact, Davutoglu’s shrinking status reflects precisely how it is possible for Erdogan to accumulate power and figuratively devour Turkey. The way things got done during Erdogan’s 12 years as prime minister did not end when he cleaned out his desk earlier this year. These have become the unwritten, uncodified rules of the game in Turkey that would be hard to change even if Erdogan were a more magnanimous, democratic-minded person. Rather, by dint of what he has accomplished and who he is—especially to his followers who refer to him as the Buyuk Usta, or “Great Master”—Erdogan exercises unchallenged power.

Washington, meanwhile, has been at a loss, as Erdogan, unrestrained by the absence of checks or balances, backs off his earlier political reforms, and in the process makes a mockery of President Barack Obama’s April 2009 declaration of a “model partnership” between the United States and Turkey as two countries that share values. Erdogan’s unbounded power and unwillingness to assist the United States against the so-called Islamic State until the Obama administration commits to regime change in Syria has led to another round of the always inconclusive debate among Turkey watchers and policymakers about how to deal with Erdogan: censure him publicly, counsel the man privately or play to his megalomania. The White House has tried private diplomacy and flattery, but the outcome of both approaches is always the same: Erdogan does what he wants, which is often contrary to Washington’s wishes and interests. Early last fall, for instance, the Obama administration sought to subtly make an end run around Erdogan by ensuring that government-to-government business would be conducted through new Prime Minister Davutoglu. It was a losing proposition as Erdogan has refused to cede any ground in the Turkish political arena. And it is going to be that way for as long as he is president, which is likely to be for another nine-plus years.

Erdogan has just become too big and, it seems, too gluttonous. But unlike sleepy Uncle Morris on the couch after Thanksgiving dinner, Erdogan cannot seem to get enough Turkey.