Outgoing Turkish President Abdullah Gul said on April 18, “Under the present conditions, I do not have any plans to get involved in politics.” It was a direct reference that Russia's Vladimir Putin-Dmitry Medvedev model wouldn’t be replicated in Turkey despite popular expectations. “I don’t believe that it is a practice befitting a democracy,” Gul said then. But Gul recently changed his mind and announced his return to the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and to active politics, which raised expectations again of a potential Gul premiership.
So what changed Gul’s mind, and why did President-elect and outgoing Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan take extreme steps to avert this possibility?
