Gul's return to Turkish politics may not be so easy
Abdullah Gul wants to return to politics, but dynamics are working against his taking over the chairmanship and the premiership of the party he helped found.
Outgoing Turkish President Abdullah Gul said on April 18, “Under the present conditions, I do not have any plans to get involved in politics.” It was a direct reference that Russia's Vladimir Putin-Dmitry Medvedev model wouldn’t be replicated in Turkey despite popular expectations. “I don’t believe that it is a practice befitting a democracy,” Gul said then. But Gul recently changed his mind and announced his return to the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and to active politics, which raised expectations again of a potential Gul premiership.
So what changed Gul’s mind, and why did President-elect and outgoing Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan take extreme steps to avert this possibility?
