March 1, 2014

Is there room left on stage for the president?

Mümtazer Türköne

With the government deciding to tie up the justice system in the face of rapidly unfolding corruption investigations, what has now emerged is a deep-rooted state crisis.

The crisis, quite naturally, has put the president at center stage. Using the power given to him by the Constitution, the president might have been able to soothe the atmosphere and solve the crisis before it got out of hand. Instead, he did the opposite: He stood before the goal post, waiting with the ball under his foot, and then kicked it off the field to gain some time.

This coming year, there are two different matches that President Abdullah Gül can set up. The first is that he could be elected again, continuing on with his presidency. The second is for the seat that Erdoğan will be leaving empty. The president has tried to keep these two options open and free by staking his position within the flanks of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Of course, there is also a risky third path, and this would be trying to create a center of power that provides solutions to the crisis by using powers vested in him because of his position.

The most influential authority of the Presidential seat is of course the power of the veto. By not using this power in relation to two controversial laws that came before him for approval, Gül has left this particular aspect of his role behind.

In short, Gül has behaved not as a president, but as a member of the Justice and Development Party (AK Party), and in doing so he has marked his position as being by the side of the prime minister. With his owns hands, he pushed away the opportunity to represent not only AK Party supporters but, in fact, all members and factions of society. In approving the Internet law, President Gül even contradicted his own words, since he had earlier said such a law would limit certain life freedoms. But his hurriedly given approval of the new Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors (HSYK) law presents an even worse situation. This new law possesses all sorts of contrivances; even if the Constitutional Court were to make it null and void, the appointments made in the interim period would be enough to allow the government to stop the corruption investigation. And so the president extended his very critical piece of support to the government by immediately approving the law. In this way, the president lost both his impartiality and his position of esteem from the vantage point of many.

In the meantime, the education law being debated right now in Parliament is one that has put the Fethullah Gülen movement directly in its sights, marking it for revenge. With the passage of this law, preparatory schools will be hurriedly shut down and, in this way, the Gülen movement's services throughout Anatolia will receive a serious blow. At the same time, all of the directors who work in the education sector and are followers of Gülen are being forcibly removed from their jobs; it is a wide-scale cleansing of sorts. This new law has absolutely no connection to any real needs in the education sector. This past week, the prime minister openly admitted in one of his speeches that there will be a move to strike at the Gülen movement through the shutdown of the preparatory schools.

If the president issues approval for this new law, which will come before him shortly, it will eliminate any remaining sense of impartiality about him. And if perchance he approves of the changes to the intelligence law that might emerge from Parliament, Gül will actually find himself counted among the architects of the new intelligence state Erdoğan is attempting to build. And if, going one step further, this piece of architecture doesn't work, and winds up crumbling, Gül will, of course, be one of those crushed under the rubble.

The Erdoğan-Gül duo are one of the more interesting political pairs to come along in political history. Their temperaments are quite different, though their strengths and tendencies are very close to one another. What lies behind their mutual success is in fact a strong alliance. What we are now witnessing emerge is this strong alliance, in the face of the most difficult phase yet of Erdoğan's political career. In showing support for Erdoğan, the president is shouldering some great risks. It is quite clear that these calculations, which appear reasonable, rely on the AK Party voters, as this whole corruption agenda has politically polarized society. In fact, these calculations are so clear that they cannot even influence AK Party voters. What the right thing to do in the midst of all this polarization would have been for the president to take on more of a guiding role for those who are confused. But instead the president lost his grip on this potentially powerful role when he immediately signed off on the laws that were put on his desk for approval.

Due to these actions, there is no longer any room left on stage for the president. In both the upcoming presidential elections this year and the AK Party's search for a new leader, some new names will have to walk onto the stage.

Published on Today's Zaman, 01 March 2014, Saturday

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