Turks wary of possible Islamist power play

Prime Minister Recep Erdogan's potential bid for president has sparked protests by secularists.

from the April 19, 2007 edition

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"When the country faces so many problems and needs so many reforms, why do we need all this needless polarization?" says Sahin Alpay, a political scientist at Istanbul's Bahcesehir University.

"We need a candidate that AKP supports, but that also wouldn't antagonize the military-civilian establishment," he said.

Erdogan is a polarizing figure

Though charismatic and popular with his electorate, Erdogan is very much a lightning rod in Turkish politics. While the country's president is expected to a kind of elder statesmen who sits above the political fray, the straight-shooting Erdogan is seen by many as too deeply involved in party politics to play that kind of role.

Secularists, meanwhile, still remember his efforts a few years ago to make adultery a crime and to rejigger Turkey's educational system to accommodate graduates of religious schools. For many of them, the idea of Erdogan's head-scarfed wife residing in the presidential palace is too much to bear.

"Are you aware of the danger? Clocks will be turned back 100 years on May 16," the secularist Cumhurriyet newspaper recently wrote, referring to the date when the new president will be sworn in.

While not referring specifically to Erdogan, the current president, arch-secularist Ahmet Necdet Sezer, said in a recent speech, "The political regime in Turkey has never faced dangers to that extent since the establishment of the republic."

"For the first time, the pillars of the secular republic are being openly questioned," Mr. Sezer, a former judge, said.

Though often described as a figurehead, the Turkish president is much more than that.

"It has become a guardian position, because it represents the state structure as set up by Ataturk," says Hugh Pope, an Istanbul-based senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, a research and advocacy organization.

For now, Erdogan is keeping his cards close to his chest. A surprise candidate may be put forward, but many experts here believe he will run.

One of the secularists' worries is that once Erdogan is ensconced in the presidential palace, the AKP will use its parliamentary power to create a system where the president has even more power, something the party has talked about doing before.

But legal and political experts believe the way to avoid recurring tension over who is to become president is to actually take away some of the Turkish president's extraordinary powers and restore the position to that of a figurehead.

"The best thing for this country would be to put an end to this strange hybrid form of government where you have a parliament and a very powerful president who is not popularly elected and not accountable to anyone," says Mr. Alpay.

"It doesn't fit in a parliamentary system."

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