Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's powerful prime minister, once said: “If I can not set the agenda [for the public to debate], I cannot be the prime minister.” Five months later he repeated: “If a prime minister cannot set the agenda, he should not remain in office.” The second utterance came in the early days of the Gezi protests. At the time a few hundred people were gathering in Gezi Park to protect a small number of trees in the only park of the popular tourist destination and park-less Taksim district. In reaction to the harsh measures the government took to disperse the rather peaceful protesters, thousands in Istanbul and elsewhere in Turkey poured into streets to protest what they have seen as an increasingly authoritarian,reckless and intrusive government. Since then, Erdogan has not been the prime agenda-setter in Turkey. There happened moments when Erdogan became happy again for setting the agenda. But not all the time, and not as much as he wanted. Rather, he found in front of him an agenda already set by others. On 17 December 2013, Erdogan woke up to face a new agenda. As a part of a massive graft investigation, tens of individuals were detained for involvement in corruption and fraud. Among the detainees were the sons of three ministers and some businessmen known to be close to Erdogan. Erdogan described the investigation as a “very, very dirty operation” against himself, his government, his party and Turkey, and accused some international actors and their local collaborators of running the show. Since then Erdogan has done what he could to stop the operation. Thousands of police officers and hundreds of prosecutors were removed from their positions and reshuffled. A new Internet law was passed to strengthen the government's power to suspend any Internet website without a court decision. A new law was passed to give extraordinary powers to the minister in the Council of Judges and State Prosecutors, the council that administers the court system in Turkey. With all these measures, each pushing Turkey more and more towards a dictatorial regime, Erdogan could manage to reduce the impact of the so-called operation, which soon extended to Erdogan's own family, including his son Bilal. Yet, still Erdogan is not able to set the agenda. This is because the legal evidence that would be used against Erdogan's cronies in the court system has since been leaked to the public through the only means the Erdogan regime cannot fully control: the Internet. The leaked files have so far shown that from bottom to top, the ruling party in Turkey has been deeply involved in widespread corruption and fraud, the details of which can probably take a book to fully detail. Honestly, I have not been surprised that much by the corruption and fraud. Any party that stays in power for that long, as the Justice and Development Party did, would likely end up like this. As I visit Turkey frequently, I have heard many stories from relatives and friends to that effect. What surprised me the most was the way — to a certain extent hypocritical —Erdogan and his party has been running Turkey's foreign relations, at least recently. First, the prime suspect in the suspended investigation was a man named Reza Zarrab, a businessman of a rather obscure background who was better known in Turkey as the husband of a famous Turkish singer, Ebru Gundes. The investigation has shown that Zarrab bribed four ministers to get several requests met, including the granting of Turkish citizenship to several members of his family, and the dismissal of some police and other officials who troubled Zarrab's affairs. More critically, the investigation found, Zarrab involved in gold trade between Turkey and Iran through which — and this is critical — Iran avoided UN-imposed economic sanctions. In other words, Turkey greatly helped Iran avoid economic sanctions. The hypocrisy is that at the time Turkey helped Iran, it also portrayed itself as the champion of the revolution in Syria. Yet, the whole world knows that the rebels Turkey has claimed to be supporting have been fighting not only the Al-Assad regime, but also Iran. Adding insult to the injury, Erdogan in his latest official visit to Iran in late January 2014 called Iran “his second house”. I am wondering what the Syrian rebels make of these gestures to Tehran if Erdogan was not making them to gain extra leverage to persuade Tehran to pressure the Bashar Al-Assad regime? Second, as is well known, the Erdogan government developed extremely cordial relations with the deposed Morsi government in Egypt. When the Egyptian army took over the government last summer, no one raised criticism of the army's takeover as much as Erdogan did. Erdogan's criticisms eventually led to a complete break in Turkey-Egypt relations. Yet, Erdogan has been silent about Egypt for quite some time. We really did not know why. New recordings of phone calls, leaked to the Internet, shed some light on Erdogan's long silence about Egypt. The first phone call is claimed to have taken place between Yassin Al-Qadi and Erdogan's son, Bilal. Yassin Al-Qadi, a Saudi businessman who has extensive business deals with the Erdogan family, asks Erdogan's son, Bilal, to arrange a meeting with the prime minister. Al-Qadi tells Bilal that he wants to explain why Erdogan should not use harsh words against Saudi Arabia. In the second recording, claimed to have taken place between Erdogan himself and his son, Bilal, the topic is a tweet, which is apparently critical of Saudi Arabia. Erdogan asks Bilal about who might have posted that tweet. Bilal confides that he himself posted it. Erdogan gets extremely angry with Bilal, to the point that he says: “We are searching for the enemy outside, but the enemy is inside.” Erdogan adds: “Do you think these guys will trust us again? Hurry and remove the tweet.” Obviously Yassin Al-Qadi was quite persuasive in explaining why Erdogan should not criticise Saudi Arabia on Egypt. Erdogan has done just more than that and dropped the whole question of Egypt off the agenda he so proudly claims to have been setting. For the last decade, numerous pieces, both academic and journalistic, have been written to explain the question of what has driven the Erdogan government's foreign policy. Some pointed to ideology, some to Turkey's need for new markets. All shed some light on the question at hand. But, from a policy perspective, the more critical question should have been: Does Turkey have the necessary hard power to realise its rather ambitious objectives? The recent leaks have shown that Turkey might not even have the necessary soft power, let alone hard power. The writer is professor at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar.
