Who gave Gökçek the order to attack?

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu has described the row between Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç and Ankara Mayor Melih Gökçek as “wrong in terms of our party’s rules and discipline.”

He has spoken to Arınç and will also meet Gökçek to voice some warnings. He said there was no exception for anybody who enters into polemics that damage the party’s reputation ahead of elections.
We don’t know what kind of disciplinary action he will take.

Arınç’s statements are hard to digest. He said that “Gökçek has sold Ankara to the parallel structure plot by plot.” He implied that he was going to reveal what he knew after the elections. For me, his most interesting sentence was the following: “Gökçek wants to pull some strings and wants the candidacy of his son approved.” Then he said this: “I will find who prompted him to attack me. We know he has done this to please some people.”

Naturally, I am curious: Who does Gökçek want to please? Who has charged him with attacking Arınç?
According to Arınç, the person who Gökçek wants to please is in “a position where he can approve his son’s candidacy.”

Who has this power?

There is a committee within the Justice and Development Party (AKP) that forms the list of deputy candidates. The Prime Minister and AKP Chair Ahmet Davutoğlu heads this committee. But we know there is also “parallel work” going on at the presidential palace simultaneously. They are both working on who should run for office, who will not turn against them in the future, and whether there any Gülenists among the candidates.

It is no secret that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is directly active in the making of the lists.
In this case, there are two suspects who could have charged Gökçek to take on Arınç: The president, or the prime minister! 

I don’t want to be the mischief maker. At the end of the day, it is not a situation that interests me. But I cannot do anything but ask, “Who doesn’t like Arınç? Erdoğan or Davutoğlu?”

The cause of the anger

President Erdoğan’s number one target these days is Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) Co-Chair Selahattin Demirtaş. 

Under normal circumstances, in our constitutional order, the president - because he represents the integrity of the state and the nation - must be “impartial.”

Thus, singling out an opposition party and its leader as a target is strange from the start. But we know that Erdoğan is not keeping his pledge to be impartial when he took office, and is instead acting like the spokesman of a political party, the AKP. He has now selected as a target the smallest party in parliament and its leader.

While he is targeting Demirtaş, he may as well also target the AKP government that he himself came from. He criticized the recent Dolmabahçe meeting and the decision to form the peace process monitoring committee as if he was not aware of it.

There is one reason for this: Erdoğan’s nightmare at the moment is the possibility that HDP passes the threshold. He knows that if the HDP passes the threshold, it will be impossible to change the constitution in the way he wants for his presidential system ambitions.

This will cause him to say goodbye to his presidential system dreams for at least four years. Maybe he will never see this dream again. 

This is the only reason for his anger.

Erdoğan as a mannequin

Erdoğan has said he is not simply a “decoration.” He said he was directly elected as the president and therefore an old era has ended. The constitution has been taken into the “waiting room.”

If he had not caused the Constitution Conciliation Commission talks to fail, maybe today we would have a more democratic constitution. But it was he who caused the failure with his presidential system ambitions. 

Therefore, the current constitution is still in effect and not in a “waiting room.”

Erdoğan knew his constitutional duties and responsibilities when he ran for office. People gave him that written post, not the one he dreamt of.

So, instead of constantly violating the constitution, he should respect this election and force himself to comply with the constitution.