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- Turkey's recent elections mean, among other things, that Erdogan, Davutoglu & Co.'s dreams of a new Middle East, built on a strictly pan-Islamist ummah[Muslim community] population and subservient to a supremacist Turkish empire, are, for some unknown time, over.
When more than 55 million Turks voted on June 7, they did not only vote to deprive President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of the worse-than-Putinesque powers he had long been campaigning for; they also said a democratic "No" to his Islamist foreign policy ambitions.
Erdogan, in the next few years, will probably be too distracted by his own efforts to re-establish his totalitarian reign to have the energy to pursue any ambitions to build the Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas-type of neighborhood he seems to be craving: a neo-Ottoman/Turkish leadership in the Middle East.
In his campaign for the June 7 parliamentary elections, Erdogan asked the Turks to give him enough seats to rewrite the constitution in such a way that he could officially become the strongman executive President of Turkey. The Turks gave him 71 seats fewer than he needed for a constitutional amendment, and 108 fewer than he needed directly to amend the Turkish charter. The Justice and Development Party (AKP), which Erdogan founded and through which he has comfortably ruled Turkey since 2002, is, for the first time, in a parliamentary minority. The AKP has been forced to negotiate with opposition parties to secure a vote of confidence in parliament.
At an extraordinary time like this, the AKP, Erdogan and the troubled Prime Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, do not have the time or energy to rewrite the history of the Middle East in favor of the resurrection of a Turkish empire.
Erdogan, in the next few years, will probably be too distracted by his own efforts to re-establish his totalitarian reign to have the energy to pursue any ambitions to build the Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas-type of neighborhood he seems to be craving: a neo-Ottoman/Turkish leadership in the Middle East.
In his campaign for the June 7 parliamentary elections, Erdogan asked the Turks to give him enough seats to rewrite the constitution in such a way that he could officially become the strongman executive President of Turkey. The Turks gave him 71 seats fewer than he needed for a constitutional amendment, and 108 fewer than he needed directly to amend the Turkish charter. The Justice and Development Party (AKP), which Erdogan founded and through which he has comfortably ruled Turkey since 2002, is, for the first time, in a parliamentary minority. The AKP has been forced to negotiate with opposition parties to secure a vote of confidence in parliament.
At an extraordinary time like this, the AKP, Erdogan and the troubled Prime Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, do not have the time or energy to rewrite the history of the Middle East in favor of the resurrection of a Turkish empire.
