An appointee of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Ahmet Davutoglu has been Turkey’s prime minister for more than five months — long enough for one to form a sound opinion about his premiership and get a good idea of how his relationship with Erdogan, Turkey’s strongman, works. Davutoglu’s premiership style and the limits of his power have been determined by this very relationship. Looking at the Erdogan-Davutoglu equation, we’ve been able to predict where Turkey is headed.

Davutoglu may have sincerely hoped to make a difference as Erdogan’s successor and be a real prime minister. But Erdogan, the very person who put him in the prime minister’s seat, has kept Davutoglu from pulling it off and proving himself.

Had Davutoglu managed to assert himself, his main difference from Erdogan would have emerged in the realm of fighting corruption. He had hinted he would not object to a Supreme Court trial for the four former ministers who were forced to quit in December 2013 after a large-scale corruption probe produced evidence of their involvement in bribery and influence peddling. He went even further, vowing several times to “break off the arm of anyone who gets involved in corruption, even if it is my brother.”

Davutoglu and Erdogan were clearly at odds on this issue. Using his clout behind the scene, Erdogan made sure that the parliamentary commission investigating the four ex-ministers, dominated by the Justice and Development Party (AKP), voted against a Supreme Court trial. On Jan. 20, the issue came to the general assembly’s agenda, and the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) submitted a motion insisting on a Supreme Court trial for the four — Egemen Bagis, Zafer Caglayan, Muammer Guler and Erdogan Bayraktar, the former ministers respectively for EU affairs, the economy, the interior and urban affairs. The AKP parliamentary group succeeded in voting down the motion, even though some of its members broke ranks.