Davutoğlu building his A-team for 2023 project

Today’s congress of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) will be the first extraordinary one in 13 years, something not very usual for the always-shaky Turkish politics, giving us clues about the in-house stability of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s party. Today, the AKP will vote for the election of Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu for the next chairmanship of the party, to mark its second era.

No doubt, Davutoğlu’s first priority will not be much different from his predecessor: to keep the ruling party stable and intact. This is why Davutoğlu and his team have been meticulously working on the formation of the next Cabinet and thus, the new party management.

Davutoğlu will probably be formally given the mandate to form the next government on Aug. 29, just a day after Erdoğan takes the office as president. He is expected to speedily introduce his Cabinet to President-elect Erdoğan on the same day. This is when we’ll all stop speculating about who’s in and who’s out in the Cabinet and start making sound analyses on Davutoğlu’s intentions. However, according to the signals delivered by ruling party officials, we can outline some of Davutoğlu’s intentions under certain titles:

Permanent Cabinet: Prime Minister-designate Davutoğlu is not building a temporary team. On the contrary, he is strategically building his A-team, a core group that will work with him over a number of years. But in order not cause an earthquake in the party, he is planning to do this Cabinet reshuffle in two phases. He will make his major changes in the Cabinet after the 2015 elections and hit the road with this team. The probable entry of Yalçın Akdoğan, Mustafa Şentop, both AKP deputies, and...