Turkey's Towering Ambition

In successive steps that have continued in recent days, the prime minister has skillfully taken control of the once-dominant—and fiercely secular—Turkish military; dozens of top generals and admirals have been thrown in jail for alleged coup plots, including one that supposedly involved bombing mosques in Istanbul. Meanwhile, his conservative Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi or AKP) has been pushing through far-reaching reforms of the judiciary and the education system, some suggest, to favor its own agenda. (Erdoğan’s rapid transformation of the courts from a bastion of Turkey’s military-secular elite into a key part of his own campaign against the military can only be the envy of Egypt’s new Islamist president, Mohammed Morsi, whose judiciary remains loyal to its own politically powerful armed forces.) More radically, AKP leaders are now drafting a new constitution that, if adopted, could turn Turkey’s parliamentary system into a strong presidential republic—just in time for Erdoğan’s planned move in 2014 to the presidency, where he could spend another decade running the country.