Gul's return to Turkish politics may not be so easy
Abdullah Gul wants to return to politics, but dynamics are working against his taking over the chairmanship and the premiership of the party he helped found.
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?
Gul’s April statement came in the aftermath of the 2013 Gezi Park protests. He was critical of the excessive use of force by police. That put him in direct contrast with Erdogan, who expressed pride in the police and accused foreign powers and a mysterious "interest rate lobby" of being behind the protests.
Gul also differed from Erdogan in his reaction to the graft probe that surfaced in December 2013. In what appeared to be the country’s most massive bribery and corruption scandal ever, Erdogan claimed that all accusations putting his government under a criminal spotlight were fabricated and the work of US-based Sunni cleric Fethullah Gulen and his followers. The Turkish media reported that the president-elect has made it a priority for the incoming premier to fight against the parallel state. On that note, analysts in the Ankara beltway told Al-Monitor that Erdogan was unhappy with Gul, who took a more balanced approach in prioritizing the rule of law rather than dealing a blow to Gulen followers.
