Number: RL34039
Title: Turkey's 2007 Elections: Crisis of Identity and Power
Authors: Carol Migdalovitz, Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Trade Division 
Abstract: The seven-year term of Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer was scheduled to expire on May 16, 2007, and parliament (the Grand National Assembly) was required to elect a successor by that date. Since November 2002, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), a party with Islamist roots which claims a conservative democratic orientation, controlled a comfortable majority in parliament, but its numbers fell short of the two-thirds needed to elect a president in the first and second rounds of a vote. Sezer, a former head of the Constitutional Court, is an ardent secularist who often vetoed AKP-proposed laws and appointments that he found conflicted with the founding nationalist and secularist principles of the state. Both the AKP and its secularist opponents understood that much was at stake in the choice of Sezer's replacement. On April 25, 2007, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan named Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul to be the AKP's candidate for president. In doing so, Erdogan appears to have severely misjudged his opposition, failed to provide sufficient time for thoughtful discussion, and contributed to one of the worst political crises in recent Turkish history.
Pages: 20
Date: September 10, 2007