Tough year ahead for Turkey

One does not need a crystal ball to see that 2015 is going to be a tough year for Turkey. Elections, corruption allegations, the Kurdish peace process, Syria, to name a few cases, will ensure that tensions remain high.

The elections planned for June will be bitterly contested because there is more at stake this time than there was ever before. Given the present distribution of power in Turkey, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) will most likely be the winner.

A victory on its own, however, is not enough.

The AKP needs a strong win to overcome the anomaly we have presently with a constitutionally mandated executive prime minister, on the one hand, and a president with executive ambitions, on the other. If the AKP cannot muster the necessary numbers in Parliament to change the Constitution and empower the president, it will be unable to overcome this anomaly.

This will leave President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in legal limbo. He will, of course, force the limits of the present Constitution to fulfill his ambitions. But his legality in exercising powers that normally do not belong to the president will remain controversial and result in acrimonious political debates and fuel social tensions.

There is also no guarantee that everyone in the AKP is happy to see the system in Turkey changed from a parliamentary one to a presidential one, especially one that is unencumbered by checks and balances the way Erdoğan and his supporters want.

There could be a historic rift within the AKP. In the meantime, corruption allegations against the AKP will continue to dominate the agenda in conjunction with the politicking aimed at the general elections and attempts to change the political system.

The AKP appears to have...