Islamist Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters on Thursday that he has “no interest” in running for another term in office during remarks calling for the country to draft an entirely new constitution.
Erdogan and his Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) have been in charge of Turkey since 2003 when Erdogan was first elected prime minister, presiding over dramatic overhauls of the Turkish federal system. After partially switching the government to a presidential system with direct elections, Erdogan began serving as the first modern president of the country in 2014. International observers considered the past two presidential elections, in 2023 and 2018, unfree and unfair as they were marked by significant violence against supporters of opposition parties and the arrest of one of the most prominent candidates in the race, Selahattin Demirtaş.
Demirtaş, the leader of the former People’s Democratic Party (HDP), is currently serving his seventh year in prison on dubious charges of ties to Kurdish separatist groups. Joining him in March was Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, the presumed presidential candidate for the secularist Republican People’s Party (CHP), facing alleged corruption charges. Over 1,000 people were arrested in March protesting İmamoğlu’s arrest; Erdogan dismissed the protests as a waste of time.
İmamoğlu was elected mayor of Istanbul in April 2024, one of the few decisive, large-scale losses for the AKP in the past five years of Turkish politics. İmamoğlu’s CHP, which narrowly lost the presidency to Erdogan a year prior, used the victory as evidence of a significant shift in political momentum in the country.
Erdogan’s comments were limited to a lack of desire to run as a political candidate again, according to translations into English, and did not explicitly address the potential that Erdogan could attempt to pursue ending presidential elections entirely.
Erdogan was returning home from a brief visit to Hungary when he made his remarks to the press on Thursday, emphasizing what he felt was the importance of developing an all-new constitution for the country. The president argued that the current legal framework was created in the aftermath of a military coup in 1980 and thus was the creation of “coup plotters,” arguing that Ankara should install a more democratic constitution.
Addressing concerns that his call to reform the constitution is intended to erase current term limits on the presidency, Erdogan reportedly said, “we want the new constitution not for ourselves but for our country.”
“I have no interest in being re-elected or becoming a candidate again,” the Emirati newspaper The National, citing the Turkish state news agency Anadolu, reported.
The Turkish newspaper Hurriyet, which was once one of the last independent media outlets in the country but whose parent company was bought out by an Erdogan ally in 2018, translated Erdogan as saying: “We don’t want a new constitution for ourselves but for our country. I have no concern about being re-elected or running for office again.”
The next presidential election is scheduled to take place in 2028; Erdogan is currently 71 years old. The National noted that Erdogan has previously hinted at wanting to perpetuate his power and possibly run for another term as president, but he has made no official declarations either way. His multi-decade stint in power and the brutality of his repression of political dissent in the past has made many concerned that any constitutional changes will be used to cement his stranglehold on power and that of the AKP.
Erdogan addressed those concerns in his comments on Thursday. Speaking to the opposition, he urged them to support an effort to draft a new constitution.
“We tell them ‘Let’s join hands. Let’s set our commissions and rewrite a civilian constitution and introduce it to our nation’,” Hurriyet quoted him as saying. “As there is no discussion concerning the first four articles of the constitution, we should just set our road map. We can swiftly establish our delegations.”
“Turkey cannot walk towards the future with a constitution written by coup plotters,” he emphasized.
Elsewhere in his remarks, Erdogan suggested that he may soon travel to the United States to meet with President Donald Trump, who he has referred to as a “dear friend” in the past.
“I may have a visit to America. I think we can find a chance to hold a face-to-face meeting with Mr. Trump there,” Erdogan indicated. “Ties between Türkiye and America are very important. Mr. Trump’s view on Türkiye is very positive, so is ours for them. We have a strong bond based on mutual respect and sincerity.”
Erdogan’s Turkey is an ascendant geopolitical power, amassing authority as one of few parties trusted by both sides of the Russian invasion of Turkey and a major pro-Hamas voice in the ongoing war between that genocidal terrorist organization and the state of Israel. Erdogan last held a phone conversation with Trump in early May, after which Erdogan said he “my dear friend in Türkiye at the earliest opportunity, and he, in turn, invited us to the U.S.”
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