As snap elections approach in Turkey on November 1, President Tayyip Erdoğan appears to be attempting to regain his Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) recently lost parliamentary majority while simultaneously doing everything he can to purge the party of anybody he deems insufficiently loyal. I mean, I don’t know what else you’d call this:
During Sept. 12-13, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) held its annual convention at a gigantic hall in Ankara. It was the first convention at which the party’s “eternal leader,” Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was not physically present, because he is, technically speaking, a “nonpartisan president,” according to the Turkish Constitution. Yet in fact, the spirit of Erdogan was everywhere, putting its mark on the party more decidedly than ever. As a result, some key AKP veterans who dared at times to disagree with Erdogan and are viewed by some outside the party as “moderates” were excluded from the party’s decision-making central committee. Meanwhile, hawks and loyalists received promotions.
Reportedly, Erdoğan went so far as to dangle a potential replacement for AKP Chair/Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, who is Erdoğan’s ally mind you, in order to ensure that Davutoğlu would go along with Erdoğan’s purge. Left off of AKP’s central committee, among other former party big-shots, was former Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç, who once upon a time was one of the three co-founders of AKP, along with Erdoğan and former Turkish President Abdullah Gül. But he publicly criticized the crackdown against the Gezi Park protests in 2013 and hasn’t been too keen on Erdoğan’s defunct (at least for the time being) plans to rewrite Turkey’s constitution in order to divert more authority to the office of the president, so he’s out.
People who spend their time watching Turkey’s political process (hey, whatever gets you up in the morning, right?) have for a while now been sort of wondering if and when Gül might return to politics; he’s been pretty quiet since stepping aside while Erdoğan ran to succeed him (last year, in Turkey’s first-ever popular election of a head of state). He’s apparently suddenly started making TV appearances to talk about how he doesn’t really see eye-to-eye with Erdoğan on a few things, such as Erdoğan’s habit of bombing Kurds and trying to rule the country like an elected dictator. This, along with the party purge, is raising the possibility that AKP is on the road to splitsville, probably not before the snap elections but quite possibly after, at least assuming that the snap election doesn’t return AKP to an uncontested majority.
Erdoğan has been working hard to literally bomb the Kurdish HDP back below the 10% threshold needed to be seated in parliament, but if that doesn’t work (or even backfires!) then there’s a pretty decent chance that the November 1 election isn’t going to restore AKP to the majority. If that happens, you can expect that the folks who just got purged from AKP’s central committee, maybe along with Gül, will blame Erdoğan for two straight election defeats (anything short of an outright parliamentary majority is a defeat for AKP), and things could get really ugly.
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