Turkey has stood strong this week in the face of intense international pressure to act against the jihadist forces laying siege to the Syrian town of Kobani across its southern border.
Leading the diplomatic resolve is a man with little political power on paper: president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Erdogan moved to the presidential palace in August after becoming Turkey’s first popularly elected president. En route, he simultaneously held the positions of prime minister and president for a time – in violation of Turkey’s constitution and to the chagrin of Turks who see his actions as an affront to the country’s democratic and secular nature.
The face of Turkish politics for the past decade, Erdogan has hinted at his desire to take some political powers with him to the presidency. He has gone on record as saying that as president he “will not be a president of protocol, but one that sweats, runs around, and works hard”. He has made no secret of his desire to see an American-style presidential system in Turkey. At present, Turkey’s prime minister acts as head of government.
Changing constitution
The ruling AK Party, which Erdogan founded and headed until taking the post of president, would need 367 seats in parliament to change the constitution and transfer powers to the president. It holds 312 seats and hopes to increase that after a general election slated for mid-2015.
"President Erdogan is bent on turning the presidency into a presidential system even though the Turkish constitution says that Turkey has a parliamentary system of government with the president exercising largely ceremonial powers," says Faruk Logoglu of the opposition Republican People's Party (CHP).
“He tried his hand at changing the constitution but failed. Now that he has been elected president by popular vote, a first for Turkey, he feels entitled to act as if he is the president of a presidential system of government. If he persists in this line of behaviour, he will either get his way or run into a confrontation with prime minister [Ahmet] Davutoglu.”
The fact that Erdogan – not Turkey’s prime minister – has been the public face and voice of the crisis looming on the country’s southern border illustrates where real power is.
It was Erdogan who spoke in front of thousands of Syrian refugees fleeing Islamic State advances across the border in Syria this week, saying, in what some see as indirect criticism of the West, that the Kurdish town of Kobani would to fall to jihadists, which could result in a massacre of civilians there.
At the same time, Turkey's most powerful politician on paper and architect of its foreign policy for the past five years, prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu, gave interviews to foreign media outlets. That was not the first time in recent months Erdogan allowed himself to indulge in populism.
Whereas in recent years both the Turkish president and prime minister addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York, this year only Erdogan, as president, did.
Last month, he met US president Barack Obama on two occasions to discuss Syria-related issues. The new prime minister was charged with meeting off an aircraft freed Turkish diplomats held hostage in Iraq.
Attila Aytekin of the Middle East Technical University in Ankara says Erdogan has managed to move seamlessly from the prime ministry to the presidency by ignoring the neutrality of the presidential office. “Just today [Friday] he has accused opposition political parties in their positions on Syria. He is speaking as if he is not neutral at all,” he said. “The head of state should be neutral in regard to political parties in Turkey.”
Successive wins
Popular support for Erdogan and his AK Party is unquestioned, however, after its successive election wins for the past 12 years.
In the back streets of Istanbul’s Kasimpasa district, Metin Avcu is drinking tea with neighbours in an alleyway outside his office before driving out to Sabiha Gokcen airport to pick up a group of Qatari tourists.
"In the 1980s and 1990s we had no Arab tourists here and the only tourists of any country that came to Turkey stayed in Istanbul. Today I have enough work; Erdogan is responsible for that," he said. "In the 1990s people had money, but the shops were empty – there was nothing to buy. We couldn't get foreign cigarettes in shops. We couldn't drink water from the tap in my home. President Erdogan changed everything."
Opposition politicians complain that the powers of the rule of law and the judiciary have been severely weakened in recent years. “Fundamental freedoms such as the freedom of expression, press and assembly are no longer respected in Turkey,” says Logoglu.
However, analysts say the Syria-related violence may have serious repercussions for Erdogan’s bid to make changes to the constitution that would see more political powers ceded to him.
“He needs a majority in parliament [after next year’s elections] and his plan was to work with the Kurdish parties to achieve that,” says Aytekin. “Now, with the violence of the past week, that obviously is not going to happen.”
