While most Western, Christian countries took a break over the Easter holidays, Turkey experienced another dramatic development. One sentence in a statement President Abdullah Gul made in the midwestern provincial capital of Kutahya hit the national agenda like a bomb. “Under the present conditions, I do not have any plans to get involved in politics,” Gul announced on April 18. The actual meaning of what he said is open to interpretation.
For the many people — including those from large swaths of influential and authorized quarters in the United States and Europe, who view Gul as the most prominent and perhaps last chance for checking Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s seeming unstoppable march toward authoritarianism — his statement came as a disappointment. Unsurprisingly, these unrepentant hopefuls or wishful thinkers tried to dissect every word of Gul's short sentence, asserting that the expected deal between Gul and Erdogan had not yet been concluded and speculating that Gul, through his statement, could be trying to strengthen his hand for the eventual meeting between the two men.
As someone who knows both men (Gul quite well) and as someone who has been observing Turkey’s political games for decades, I wasn’t much baffled when I read Gul’s statement. When The Wall Street Journal and Reuters had called me for an opinion shortly before Gul’s statement, I had said with a degree of comfort that Gul is not likely to favor the idea of serving as prime minister under an Erdogan presidency, and thus we should not expect Gul to enter into the race to become the chairman of the post-Erdogan Justice and Development Party (AKP). Does this therefore signal that Gul is forgoing a struggle with Erdogan? Yes, definitely, in capital letters. Does that also preclude some sort of “Putin-Medvedev swap” on which many have lately speculated and see, especially in Western circles, as the least worse-case scenario for Turkey? In bigger and bolder black capital letters, yes!
Even if Russian President Vladimir Putin most resembles Erdogan in Turkey's neighborhood, one thing is for certain. There is no similarity whatsoever between Gul and Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev. With his latest statement, Gul drove the last nail into the coffin of the Putin-Medvedev model. The timing of Gul’s dramatic statement is interesting in this regard.
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