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.