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Five other lawmakers resigned from the AKP alongside Davutoglu.
Davutoglu is seen as something of
a bureaucrat rather than a charismatic politician, but, importantly, during his time at the top of the AKP he appointed many of the party’s current provincial heads – some of these officials could end up at Davutoglu’s side, with Erdogan said to be planning to purge any such unreliable individuals from the AKP hierarchy.
Babacan’s move
Earlier this week, another former member of Erdogan’s team, ex-deputy prime minister and economic czar
Ali Babacan confirmed to a Turkish daily that he is set to form a new political party by the end of the year to challenge the AKP.
Like Davutoglu, 52-year-old Babacan refrained from stating he is taking on Erdogan, 65, directly, but given the weakening of parliament’s powers and scrapping of the position of prime minister that took place when Erdogan last year became Turkey’s first executive president in a newly-constituted presidential republic, it is not so much the AKP that the challengers need to dislodge but the nearly-all-powerful president himself.
Once seen as just about invincible, Erdogan finds himself vulnerable to rivals with new ideas – including Ekrem
Imamoglu the hugely popular opposition mayor of Istanbul who twice humiliated the president earlier this year by winning a vote and then a ‘revote’ to win the mayorship of the iconic commercial and cultural capital of the country.
While Turkey’s economy was booming many Turks tolerated his assumption of more and more power, authoritarian purges and increasingly tight state
party. However, such a declaration was not forthcoming, and there is still the possibility he might join Babacan’s party, though there has been some speculation that Babacan, who is informally working on creating the party with former president Abdullah Gul, is not keen on the idea.
Davutoglu, a professor, has this year faced disciplinary action from the AKP
“Erdogan finds himself vulnerable to rivals with new ideas – including Ekrem Imamoglu the hugely popular opposition mayor of Istanbul”
control over the country’s affairs. But it is likely that if an election was held right now Erdogan, Turkey’s leader of towards 17 years, would be held responsible by a majority of Turks for the painful crash-landing the debt- fuelled country has endured, starting with last year’s currency crisis.
Line-up of Davutoglu, Babacan
and Gul?
Some observers expected Davutoglu to combine his statement on resigning from the AKP with an announcement that he was forming a new opposition
over his criticism of its policies. It was expected that the party would soon dismiss him.
“In order to prevent the AKP’s loyal base from living through the sadness of seeing their own chairman dismissed, we are resigning from our party, for which we gave years of brow sweat and guidance,” Davutoglu, who served as prime minister between 2014 and 2016 before falling out with Erdogan, added at the press conference.
After his re-election last year, and
his adoption of the sweeping powers that come with the new executive presidential system, Erdogan named his son-in-law Berat Albayrak as finance minister. Davutoglu strongly criticised the move, remarking that the country did not belong to a person or a family.
Babacan, 52, outlined his intentions in an interview published on September 10 by Karar newspaper. “Values like human rights, freedoms, populist democracy and the rule of law are ones that we always defend and believe in. These principles are not a periodic political preference for us,” he told the publication, adding that the AKP was committed to these values in the past.
“After all these achievements, the condition in which Turkey is currently in
“The AKP ... no longer has the ability to be a solution to our country’s problems,” Davutoglu said.
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