Will President Gul of Turkey Stop Prime Minister Erdogan's Power Grab? ISTANBUL - There is an increasingly heated debate among the columnists of Taraf, a Turkish-language newspaper to which I contribute, about whether the Turkish government is past saving. One side believes it still is possible to fan the embers of the reforming zeal that the Justice and Development Party (A.K.P.) first brought to power in 2002. The other contends that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is punch-drunk with power. Put another way the question is, where will the impetus for reform come from? The political opposition is weak, and outside bodies like the European Union no longer enjoy much leverage. The E.U.'s recent progress report [pdf] describes a country unable to get on with democratization. But with Turkey's membership prospects not so much frozen as in cryonic suspension, who in Ankara is going to listen to Brussels? One downside to the A.K.P.'s success in taming the military's unofficial resistance to elected government is that there no longer is an institutional barrier to Erdogan's drive to become ever more powerful. One unexpected candidate may be Erdogan's closest political colleague: Abdullah Gul, the Turkish president. Gul appears to be increasingly concerned with A.K.P.'s political legacy - which is his legacy as well. Once upon a time, Gul was the brains to Erdogan's charismatic brawn. Together, in the 1990s, they led a discredited Islamist party into the political center stage. They convinced international bankers that they were market-friendly, reassured Washington that they were committed to the NATO alliance and impressed Brussels that Europe was where Turkey's future lay. And because they had grassroots support, they could deliver on these vows. In 2002, Erdogan was banned from politics after having committed the felonious act of reciting a poem with religious symbolism at a political rally. So it was Gul who became the first A.K.P. prime minister. In an act of extreme loyalty, he then stepped aside to let Erdogan take over his job after Parliament lifted the ban. Erdogan paid back this debt by supporting Gul for the presidency in 2007 -- even calling a general election after the military objected to Gul's candidacy partly because Gul's wife wore an Islamic headscarf. But now there may be new scores to settle. Erdogan wants Gul's job once again. And this time Gul may not be so ready to give it up. Gul's term expires in 2014, at which point the president will be elected, for the first time, by popular vote instead of by Parliament. This change might not have much mattered to Erdogan when he still ranked sky-high in opinion polls. But these days the electorate appears to have taken on some of my Tarafcolleagues' concerns. An opinion poll last month predicted that in a contest between Gul and Erdogan, Gul would win by 51 percent to 23 percent. The Erdogan camp says Gul wouldn't dare stand in the way. Some pundits say that like Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, Gul and Putin might just swap jobs. Then again, Gul might try to stay put; after all, lately he has become the government's most effective critic. When Gul opened the season's first session of Parliament earlier this month he urged the government to get on with work on a much-needed new constitution and a program of reforms to revive Turkey's E.U. bid. This was in pointed contrast to Erdogan's rousing address to an A.K.P. congress the day before: in that, the word Europe did not come up at all. Gul also called on Parliament to allow the handful of elected members of Parliament awaiting trial for allegedly conspiring to stage a coup against Erdogan's government or encouraging sedition on behalf of the Kurds to be freed from prison and allowed to take back their seats. Erdogan immediately said this was not a view he shared. Just this week, the government proposed a constitutional amendment that would bring the date of local elections forward by six months, to October 2013; the point was to free up Erdogan so that he would have time to campaign for president in early 2014. The motion passed through Parliament, but with just a small majority and so it would need to be approved by referendum to go into effect. Gul returned the bill unsigned. This means that Parliament will have to fix another election date - but also that Gul spared the government the embarrassment of holding a referendum for a self-serving technicality. How much longer will he continue to be so obliging?