The Justice and Development Party has spent years building Turkey's economy and reining in the military's power in the political realm. The party also has previously attempted to open a dialogue to address tensions with the Kurds. But even if these issues are addressed, Ankara will not be able to focus on its regional ambitions until the ruling party resolves the leadership and political system transitions at home.
The crisis of the Justice and Development Party is rooted in the party's origins. For most of the last 100 years, Turkey was ruled either by the military or by weak coalition governments. The Justice and Development Party changed that. It was founded as a coalition of Islamists, pragmatists, independents, reformists, centrists, conservatives and even much of Turkey's leftist-liberal movement, which saw it as a way to defang the powerful military. From the beginning, the party was able to build a broad support base, harnessing the growing economic clout of the new entrepreneurial, but socially conservative, class in the Anatolian heartland as a force against the old economic and cultural elites of Istanbul and Ankara.
Now the ruling party is facing an internal generational shift. According to the party bylaws, members cannot serve more than three consecutive terms in parliament. That means a reported 73 senior party members — including Erdogan, Vice Prime Minister Bulent Arinc, Deputy Prime Minister Responsible for the Economy Ali Babacan and Parliament Speaker Cemil Cicek — will be ineligible to run for re-election in 2015. Losing so many senior leaders from parliament will be a blow to the Justice and Development Party, since bringing in a younger crowd of politicians will create a host of problems. Party cohesiveness, cooperation and coordination, leadership and focus — not to mention cooperation with a potential Erdogan presidency — could prove difficult.
Erdogan is already said to be trying to persuade senior politicians from outside the ruling party to transition in as a way to maintain cohesiveness and commitment to the party's established agenda. In late June, Turkish media reported that Erdogan was in talks with the highly respected leftist Islamist politician Numan Kurtulmus to join the ruling party's leadership.
The Party's Constitutional Challenge
One way the government hopes to manage the leadership transition is to keep a number of the current key senior leaders in a leadership role. A way to do that is to transform the current parliamentary system — in which the president's powers are largely ceremonial — into a system that gives the president real powers and diminishes the role of the prime minister. Erdogan could then run for president and build a Cabinet from a mixture of the younger cadres within the ruling party in parliament and the older politicians who have already served three terms.
To change the political system, Erdogan will need to either get a two-thirds majority in parliament or put the issue to a national referendum. Both options present major challenges.
The Justice and Development Party holds 327 seats in the 550-seat parliament. It needs 366 votes to amend the constitution. In order to get the 39 votes it would lack, the party would need support from one or more of the opposition parties. Gaining that support will be tricky, if not impossible. The three main opposition parties — the secular nationalist Republican People's Party (135 seats), the Nationalist Movement Party (52 seats) and the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (35 seats) — all fear a presidential system and a decade-long Erdogan presidency.
If Erdogan successfully manages a change to a presidential system, he could run for president in 2015. If he wins, he could serve a five-year term, then run again in 2020 and, if victorious, serve another five-year term until 2025. Erdogan has been prime minister since 2003, so two presidential victories would mean Erdogan will have been at the helm of Turkish politics, legally, for 22 years. This possibility will make Turkey's opposition parties unlikely to cooperate in changing the country's parliamentary system.
The other option is a constitutional referendum. In order to take the amendment to a national referendum, Erdogan's party would need only a three-fifths to two-thirds majority (330 to 367 votes) in parliament. Of course, the amendment would then need to pass in the polls.
Consensus Building
One of the first steps necessary to change to a presidential system is an alteration to presidential term limits.
Current Turkish President Abdullah Gul was elected in 2007 in an indirect election with a seven-year term. The law was changed shortly thereafter in one of the two constitutional referendums held since the Justice and Development Party took power. The new law, which the ruling party had promoted, made the presidency subject to direct popular elections and limited presidents to two five-year terms. A high court ruled on Gul's presidency June 15, announcing that Gul would be able to finish his current term — which ends in 2014 — and run again for another five-year term.
The ruling has paved the way for the next step: a constitutional referendum. The Justice and Development Party has been drafting a new constitution since May. No time frame has been made public for putting the new constitution to a national vote. The ruling party largely controls the drafting process, and with the parliament heading into its summer session, the issue is not likely to move forward until later in 2012.
But Erdogan is already courting the opposition. On June 6, he met with Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the opposition Republican People's Party, in Ankara. The two agreed to establish a joint commission to address the Kurdish issue. Kilicdaroglu's party wholly opposes the transformation of the political system and is well aware of Erdogan's presidential ambitions. What Erdogan can offer the opposition party in exchange for support on the referendum remains to be seen. That the Republican People's Party has joined forces with Erdogan on the Kurdish issue suggests that compromises are possible. However, the other main opposition group — the Nationalist Movement Party — refused to participate in the commission.
Erdogan also seems hopeful of healing a rift with the powerful Gulenist movement. On June 15, Erdogan issued an invitation to the movement's founder, Fethullah Gulen, to return to Turkey. The invitation came during a speech Erdogan gave at the 10th Turkish Olympiads, a Gulenist event. Although Erdogan was certain the invitation would be declined, inviting Gulen to return to Turkey nonetheless increased the prime minister's standing with the movement at home.
The Gulenist movement's interests once largely aligned with the Justice and Development Party's. The movement began exerting too much power for the ruling party's liking, however, especially when Gulenist prosecutors in Turkey's special courts began questioning the ruling party's meetings with the Kurdistan Workers' Party from 2009 through 2011. The allies also differed over the trials targeting Turkey's secularist military.
In essence, the Justice and Development Party built its popularity with support from the Gulenist movement. The rift between them has widened, but the Gulenists still rely on the ruling party as a political vehicle and the party needs the Gulenist movement's support in order to maintain its political dominance. The compromise over the abolition of the special courts clearly illustrates their continued mutual dependence.
Controversy Over the Special Courts
Turkey's special courts have been used to target the military, Kurdish dissidents, militants, mayors of Kurdish towns and anyone else suspected of supporting the Kurdish cause. Eliminating these courts was a key move for the Justice and Development Party to regain the trust and support of the military — both its senior leaders and the rank-and-file — and to gain the small but growing Kurdish vote.
Turkey has had a yearslong conflict with the country's Kurds, who account for about 14 million of Turkey's estimated 74 million people. The Kurdish population is fractured, largely along tribal lines, but Kurdish national parties gained ground in Turkey's last parliamentary elections — something that Erdogan and the ruling party have not ignored.
Erdogan has cracked down on the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party, which has continued attacking government targets inside Turkey (Ankara also has accused Syria of giving the Kurdish rebels haven). At the same time, the prime minister has reached out to Kurdish leaders and the community. On June 12, he announced that the Kurdish language could become an elective in public schools — a small but symbolic recognition of Kurdish culture and identity.
On June 30, Erdogan met for an hour and a half with Kurdish independent parliamentary member Leyla Zana. A widely respected figure among the Kurdish community for her commitment to the Kurdish cause, Zana spent 10 years in jail for supporting Kurdish nationalism. Both before and after the meeting, Zana expressed support for Erdogan's initiatives to resolve the Kurdish issue, saying that she has faith in the prime minister and calling for the resumption of negotiations with Kurdish militants. In response, the Kurdistan Workers' Party criticized her comments.
The meeting with Zana is part of Erdogan's strategy to build support among the Kurdish leadership while dividing the Kurds politically and undermining the Kurdistan Workers' Party by splitting its support base. The Justice and Development Party will not resolve the Kurdish issue anytime soon, but breaking up support for Kurdish militants within the Kurds' political leadership will help erode the militants' support among the Kurdish population. Already, the Peace and Democracy Party's co-leader Selahattin Demirtas has called on the militants to stop its armed attacks in Turkey.
The ruling party's imperatives are clear, as is its strategy. Erdogan has so far managed to balance the political opposition and the Kurdish issue by bringing in the Republican People's Party to restart talks, but any real negotiations with the Kurds will require serious discussions with the opposition. Already constrained by the intraparty transition, the Justice and Development Party ultimately will be limited in what it can give to either the political opposition or the Kurds.
Healing the rift with the Gulenist movement will be even more difficult, but Erdogan has made a start and will now probably look for other issues or areas that can show a willingness to compromise with the movement without ceding any real power. Erdogan is making the necessary first moves in a much larger game plan.
