ANKARA, 19 April 2007 — Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said yesterday that he would announce his party’s nomination for upcoming presidential elections next week. “I will announce it on the day when my party holds its parliamentary group meeting,” Erdogan told reporters, adding that this would be either next Tuesday or Wednesday.
The ten-day period to register presidential candidates ends at midnight next Wednesday. Erdogan, a conservative with an Islamist political past, did not say whether he would run for the post himself, a prospect that has struck at the heart of this Muslim country’s secular identity.
The prime minister was speaking after an eight-hour meeting of the executive board of his Justice and Development Party (AKP), which gave him full authority to decide on who their presidential candidate should be.
The AKP gave him full authority to decide on their future candidate for the upcoming presidential elections. “I should underline straight away that no candidate names were discussed,” Edibe Sozen, the AKP deputy chairwoman told reporters here after the eight-hour meeting. “The AKP executive board has given the chairman full authority to finalize the process and consultations with civic bodies will continue until the last day of registration” of presidential candidates on April 2.
She would not say whether the AKP would wait until April 25 to announce its candidate, as Erdogan has previously hinted, and said the decision was up to the prime minister. The AKP candidate is virtually certain to win the race thanks to the party’s comfortable majority in Parliament, which elects the president.
An opposition leader who discussed the elections with Erdogan on Tuesday said he believed Erdogan would not run. “I got the impression that he would not be a candidate,” Mehmet Agar, head of the small center-right True Path Party, told the Sabah newspaper.
Opponents say that with Erdogan in the presidential palace, the AKP, which already dominates Parliament and local administrations, will seize the last secular bastion of the state and advance an Islamist agenda. Along with ceremonial duties, the president has the final word on appointing senior government officials and a right to reject bills enacted by Parliament.
Outgoing President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, a hard-line secularist whose seven-year term expires on May 16, has often put the brakes on the AKP. He has sent back to Parliament laws he considered breaches of the secular constitution and blocked the appointment of officials seen as Islamist government cronies.
