Recep Tayyip Erdogan

Ahmet Davutoglu was once one of Turkiye’s most powerful figures: The academic who helped shape the country’s ambitious foreign policy after the turn of the century, served as foreign minister and prime minister, and was chosen by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to lead the governing Justice and Development Party, or AK Party.

But later, he became a critic of the political system he had helped build.

Now, after announcing that his opposition Future Party would cease political activities, Davutoglu is withdrawing from party politics. He described the decision not as surrender but as an effort to distance himself from what he called Turkiye’s “polluted political climate”.

His departure leaves a contested legacy – that of an intellectual who transformed Tukiye’s diplomatic outlook, but struggled to turn his ideas and prominence into an independent political movement.

From professor to foreign minister

Born in 1959 in Taskent, in the central province of Konya, Davutoglu studied economics and political science at Bogazici University before becoming an academic.

He taught in Malaysia and at universities in Turkiye, with students calling him “Hoca”, or the professor – a title that followed him into government.

Davutoglu became widely known for his so-called “strategic depth” doctrine, the argument that Turkiye’s geography, Ottoman history and connections across the Balkans, Middle East, Caucasus and Central Asia could make it a central diplomatic power rather than a country confined to Europe’s periphery.

After the AK Party came to power in 2002, he became Erdogan’s chief foreign policy adviser. He was appointed foreign minister in 2009 and entered parliament in 2011.

His early years in government coincided with an expansion of Turkish influence.

Ankara opened embassies, strengthened its presence in Africa and the Middle East, mediated regional disputes and promoted trade and visa-free travel with neighbouring countries. The approach became known as “zero problems with neighbours”.

Tarik Celenk, a writer and analyst familiar with Turkiye’s conservative intellectual tradition, said Davutoglu altered the country’s diplomatic culture.

“Davutoglu brought a change of mentality to the Foreign Ministry cadres,” Celenk said, crediting him with opening diplomacy to businesses and civil society.

Celenk noted that Davutoglu sought to position Turkiye as a country capable of communicating with otherwise incompatible actors. “Davutoglu was able to have good relations with Hamas, with Russia, and also to have good relations with the US,” he added.

Davutoglu called this intensive and multidirectional engagement “rhythmic diplomacy” – an effort to maintain dialogue across competing regional and global power centres.

But the Arab uprisings, particularly the war in Syria, exposed the limits of that vision, analysts said. Turkiye supported the Syrian opposition and anticipated that President Bashar al-Assad’s government would fall quickly. Instead, the conflict brought mass displacement, security threats and prolonged instability.

“His principal mistake in foreign policy was that he was very emotional, very romantic,” said Celenk, arguing that Davutoglu struggled to establish boundaries between “idealism, romanticism and realism”.

Erdogan’s chosen successor

When Erdogan moved from the prime minister’s office to the presidency in 2014, he selected Davutoglu to succeed him as AK Party leader and prime minister.

The arrangement contained a fundamental contradiction. Under Turkiye’s parliamentary system at the time, Davutoglu formally headed the government. But Erdogan continued to dominate the governing party and exercise authority from the presidency while advocating an executive presidential system.

Davutoglu led the AK Party through two elections in 2015. After losing its parliamentary majority in June, the party regained it in November with nearly half the national vote. Yet the victory did not give Davutoglu an independent power base.

According to Celenk, Davutoglu entered politics imagining a forest without “wolves, foxes, jackals or snakes” – but discovered while prime minister “that this forest did not exist”.

Amid disagreements over appointments, governance and Erdogan’s efforts to expand presidential authority, Davutoglu stepped down in 2016. He remained in the AK Party for another three years before resigning and establishing the Future Party in 2019.

An opposition party without a base

The party sought to attract conservative voters disillusioned with Erdogan while advocating parliamentary democracy, the rule of law and accountable government. It never developed substantial electoral support.

Political scientist Berk Esen said opposition parties face structural disadvantages in Turkiye, where the governing party has extensive access to state resources and much of the media.

But those conditions did not fully explain the failure of Davutoglu’s party, he added. “For one thing, the Future Party was already half stillborn by its very foundation,” argued Esen.

Davutoglu and Ali Babacan, another former senior AK Party figure, established separate opposition parties, dividing an already limited pool of disaffected conservative voters. Both also struggled to confront the records of the governments in which they had served.

In the 2023 elections, Future Party candidates entered parliament on the lists of the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, then Turkiye’s main opposition party. The arrangement delivered seats but exposed the party’s dependence on a larger organisation.

Esen said pursuing guaranteed representation prevented the Future Party from fielding its own candidates across Turkiye and building local networks.

“In order to achieve a small success in the short term, they squandered the party’s institutional identity in the medium term,” he said. “And that is already why this party closed.”

Celenk offered a similar assessment: “You could say that the Future Party was never the party of the future. It became stuck in the past.”

Yet he distinguished between Davutoglu, the unsuccessful party leader, and Davutoglu, the intellectual.

“Let us criticise Ahmet Davutoglu the politician together, all the way to the end,” he said.

“But Ahmet Davutoglu’s intellectual production capacity within the conservative community was belittled and not taken seriously,” added Celenk, referring to sections of Turkiye’s conservative political and religious establishment which, according to him, benefited from Davutoglu’s ideas and intellectual framework but did not sufficiently acknowledge his contribution.

Esen said he doubts Davutoglu could exercise significant political influence while Erdogan remains in power. “But I think, in practice, his political career appears to be over,” he said.

Yet the analysts found substance in Davutoglu’s explanation for withdrawing. Celenk said his four-page letter offered a serious diagnosis of “the state the country, its politics and its society have reached”, including the risk that Turkiye was “losing its character as a nation”. Esen agreed that “Turkish politics has become very polluted and authoritarian”, adding that some of Davutoglu’s criticisms were therefore well grounded.

Davutoglu exits party politics without establishing the conservative democratic alternative he promised. But some of the ideas and diplomatic practices he introduced survived his loss of power, ensuring that debate over his legacy will outlast the party he founded.

“At least as Davutoglu leaves politics and withdraws from institutional politics, this must be remembered,” said Celenk.

Istanbul, Turkiye – At around 19:30 GMT on July 15, 2016, a faction of the Turkish military launched a coordinated attempt to overthrow President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s democratically elected government.

But within hours, the attempted takeover involving tanks and fighter jets had been quashed. Thousands of people poured onto the streets of major cities, joining loyalist members of the army and the police, and much of the chain of command, in defeating the putschists.

The failed coup attempt 10 years ago was not only the bloodiest in Turkiye’s modern history – some 250 were killed and more than 2,200 wounded – but also a watershed moment that fundamentally changed relations between civil and military authorities in the country.

“The failure of July 15 had three pillars,” said retired Colonel Unal Atabay.

“The resistance of the people, the officers, noncommissioned officers and soldiers inside the Turkish Armed Forces who resisted the coup, and the institutional reflex of the armed forces themselves.”

Military intervention cast a long shadow over Turkish politics for decades.

The armed forces overthrew governments in 1960 and 1980; intervened through a memorandum in 1971; and forced another elected government from office in what became known as the “post-modern coup” of 1997.

Although civilian rule returned after each intervention, the military remained one of Turkiye’s most influential institutions, seeing itself as the guardian of the republic’s founding principles.

Yet that was not how the republic’s founders had envisioned civil-military relations. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and Ismet Inonu, both commanders during the War of Independence of the early 1920s, entered politics only after leaving military service.

“If the military had remained involved in politics, it would most likely have been exploited by various groups in the uncertain and weak conditions of those early years of the republic. They made the most accurate diagnosis and said that the military should stay out of politics.

Political scientist Ali Carkoglu said separation between military command and civilian politics was regarded as one of the republic’s founding principles, calling it “the most accurate diagnosis”.

Over time, however, the armed forces increasingly came to see themselves as guardians of the state, repeatedly invoking that role to justify intervention in politics.

But 10 years since the latest attempt, few experts believe Turkiye faces another conventional coup.

“You never say never,” said Howard Eissenstat, a Turkiye specialist at St Lawrence University in New York. “But to bet on a military coup in Turkiye is to lose money.”

While the military’s political role appears to have receded, the broader consequences of the post-coup transformation remain the subject of debate.

Reducing the military’s influence over politics had already become a central objective of the governing Justice and Development Party, or AK Party, after it came to power in 2002.

Following years of tension with the military establishment, the government steadily expanded civilian oversight – and the failed coup accelerated that process dramatically.

Ankara accused the network of United States-based Muslim scholar Fethullah Gulen, designated by the Turkish government as the Fethullah Terrorist Organisation (FETO), of orchestrating the coup attempt. Tens of thousands of soldiers, judges, police officers, teachers and civil servants were dismissed or arrested. Military academies were replaced by the National Defence University, command structures were overhauled, and civilian oversight of the armed forces expanded.

Atabay said these changes have fundamentally reshaped the relationship between the military, the state and society.

He added the military has strengthened its internal oversight after the coup to prevent another organised infiltration, noting that both the armed forces and wider society are now more alert to attempts to penetrate state institutions.

“External centres of power may always make such attempts,” he said. “The important thing is to detect them early, expose them and build a system that prevents them from infiltrating the state.”

For Carkoglu, however, the military cannot be examined in isolation from the broader health of Turkiye’s democratic institutions.

He said bringing the armed forces firmly under civilian authority was essential. But civilian supremacy alone, he argued, does not necessarily amount to democratic consolidation.

“It is certainly a success that civilian authority has established greater control over the military,” he said. “But if that comes at the expense of democracy, then it is, at the very least, an unfortunate outcome for Turkish politics.”

Carkoglu noted that institutions derive legitimacy not simply from who controls them, but from whether citizens trust them.

“The healthy development of trust in institutions requires competitive politics and the possibility of free expression,” he said. “Otherwise, institutions themselves begin to lose credibility.”

That debate has become increasingly prominent in recent years.

The arrests of several opposition mayors – including Istanbul mayor and presidential candidate for the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) Ekrem Imamoglu, together with investigations into other opposition politicians, have fuelled criticism from political parties and rights groups, who argue judicial processes are increasingly being used against rivals.

The government rejects those accusations, saying the investigations are conducted independently and are based solely on evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

The debate has unfolded during a period of remarkable political continuity. Since coming to power in 2002, the AK Party has won every parliamentary election, most recently in 2023, when the governing People’s Alliance retained its parliamentary majority.

Rights groups, meanwhile, focus on a different legacy of the coup.

Human Rights Watch says emergency powers introduced after the 2016 coup attempt gradually evolved into broader restrictions on civil liberties. It argues the crackdown extended well beyond those responsible for the attempted overthrow, leaving many dismissed public employees unable to rebuild their professional lives even after acquittal.

The government says the measures were necessary to dismantle clandestine networks inside the state and prevent Turkiye from facing a similar threat again.

Ten years on, that effort continues. On Monday, two days before the anniversary, Turkish authorities launched coordinated operations across all 81 provinces targeting nearly 1,000 suspects over alleged links to FETO.

For the government, it was another reminder that the events of July 2016 remain an active national security issue rather than a closed chapter in the country’s history.

June 24 (UPI) — Democratic lawmakers accused the Trump administration Wednesday of seeking to push through a multimillion-dollar arms deal with Turkey by bypassing congressional review, the latest executive action critics say usurps the lawmakers’ authority.

Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he was informed by the Trump administration late Tuesday that it would bypass congressional review of an arms sale to Turkey worth more than $700 million.

“The State Department did not even attempt to justify its decision,” Meeks said in a statement.

“It did not invoke any emergency authority, did not present a written rationale and for months refused to make a good-faith effort to brief me on implications of the sale for the U.S.-Turkey relationship, Turkey’s continued possession of the Russian S-400 system and other regional security concerns,” he continued.

“It simply informed my office that it would immediately proceed with a formal notification of the sale.”

Turkey is a U.S. ally and NATO member with a robust defense industry. However, it’s led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an increasingly authoritarian leader who has maintained ties with Russia and whose government uses the Kremlin’s S-400 Triumph missile defense system.

The United States and NATO opposed Turkey’s adoption of the S-200 system, and Washington removed Turkey from the F-35 fighter program in 2019 during Trump’s first administration.

Meeks called the decision to bypass congressional review “yet another deeply troubling example of this administration’s open contempt for Congress’ oversight authority.

“There can be no pretense that this was urgent or unavoidable,” he said, stating the items will not be delivered to Turkey for years.

“This was a deliberate choice to shut Congress out and to treat legitimate oversight as an inconvenience to be brushed aside.”

Trump is scheduled to visit Turkey early next month. During a White House press conference alongside NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte on Tuesday, he praised Erdogan as “a great friend.”

Erdogan is known to be seeking to acquire U.S.-made fighter jets, including the F-35. Asked if he was planning to announce a potential deal when he visits Ankara, Trump replied: “I’m going to probably do something that’s going to make him very happy.”

It was unclear if jets were part of the arms deal.

UPI has contacted the State Department for comment and to detail the contents of the sale.

Democrats and other critics of President Donald Trump have repeatedly accused his administration of bypassing Congress through executive orders and unilateral decisions, particularly in its use of the military.

The Trump administration has faced staunch criticism from opponents for launching a war against Iran in late February without congressional authorization. Democrats have frequently argued that the Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to declare war.

Democrats have also criticized the administration’s use of the military to attack suspected drug-trafficking boats in the Pacific and Caribbean without congressional authorization.