Oct 23, 2016

Since he was elected as Turkey’s president in August 2014, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been hoping to redesign the Turkish Constitution to introduce an executive presidential system. The July 15 failed coup put that discussion aside for a moment, but not for long. Last week, the leader of the opposition Nationalist Action Party, Devlet Bahceli, who has lately emerged as a political ally of Erdogan, announced that his party could help the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) take the presidential system to a referendum. As a result, political observers began to expect a referendum in early 2017. In fact, government spokesman Hayati Yazici made the plan clear by noting that a constitutional amendment may come to the parliament in January and that a referendum could be held in April.

Given Erdogan’s popularity, which was only boosted with the public reaction to the coup attempt, the referendum would very likely get a “yes” vote. This would be followed by an election to choose the new president, a second ballot that Erdogan could easily win. Erdogan, in other words, may well be the first leader of the second Turkish Republic whose political system will revolve around an executive presidency.

What kind of presidency would this be? An answer to this question came from Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag, an Erdogan confidant, last week. “[Mustafa Kemal] Ataturk’s era was presidential system in action,” he said, asking, “Can you name any prime minister of that era with the exception of [Ismet] Inonu? You can’t.” This reference to Ataturk surprised some observers, because the conservative/Islamic political camp that Erdogan and his party comes from has traditionally not been a fan of Ataturk and his staunchly secularist era. Turkish-American academic Timur Kuran noted the irony here, tweeting: “Turkish Islamists have treated Ataturk's regime as a destructive dictatorship. Now AKP uses Ataturk to justify its own monopoly of power.”

In fact, references to Ataturk are not new in the latter-day AKP. When Erdogan launched his election campaign in 2014, he initiated it in Samsun, the city where Ataturk had famously launched Turkey’s War of Liberation (1919-1922). Since then, Erdogan has defined his political struggle as “Turkey’s Second War of Liberation,” a claim he repeated with more emphasis in the aftermath of the failed coup. In August 2014, right after being elected president, Erdogan wrote that “the gap” that emerged between the Turkish people and their president after Ataturk’s death had been closed only with Erdogan's election.

These positive references about Ataturk by Erdogan and his supporters are not surprising because although Erdogan’s ideology is very different from that of Ataturk, he is embarking on a similar historical role: Ataturk was an undisputed savior-founder who ruled Turkey single-handedly for decades. Erdogan, too, is now gradually becoming an undisputed savior-founder who may rule Turkey single-handedly for decades.