Framing a Presidential Foreign Policy in a Parliamentary System: Erdo？an and Mukhtars’ Meetings

During the period between his election as the Turkish president in August 2014 and the constitutional referendum that introduced a presidential system in Turkey in April 2017, Recep Tayyip Erdo？an tried to demonstrate that he would not be a symbolic political figure in Turkish politics as many former Turkish presidents had been. Instead, he would keep shaping the domestic and foreign agenda of the country, as it would happen in a presidential system. One of the main ways he did this was through a series of mukhtars’ meetings, which began in January 2015. From that point, until the desired changes to the constitution were approved through public referendum, Erdo？an held thirty-seven mukhtars’ meetings. In these meetings he gave speeches about Turkish domestic and foreign policy directly to a group of mukhtars but, more importantly, indirectly to the Turkish public and foreign actors. This article will analyze Erdo？an’s foreign policy messages through his discourse in the mukhtars’ meetings and try to answer two controversial questions regarding his foreign policy ideology: Whether he is an Islamist and whether he is shifting the foreign policy axis of Turkey