On 3 September the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office announced an investigation into Ahmet Davutoğlu under Article 299 of the Turkish Penal Code, insulting the President. It opened the file on its own initiative, after posts circulating on social media were assessed as containing insult.
The speech dates from 2021. In it Davutoğlu accused ministers who followed him in office of enriching themselves, said the President had made his son-in-law a minister and enriched his relatives, and said Turkey had been handed to five contractors. He framed it as a matter of public money: they violated the rights of the people.
“I too could have added billions to my wealth, like the ministers who came after me. Yet I did not consume a single penny of illicit gain. I told them too: ‘Do not partake of what is illicit.’
But they did. They enriched those around them. He made his son-in-law a minister and enriched his relatives. He handed Turkey over to five contractors.
Are you saying the same thing to me? Are you telling me, ‘You are a professor; keep quiet’?
They violated the rights of the people. Had they respected the rights of the people and refrained from taking what belongs to orphans, I too would have respected their rights. But they violated the rights of the people.”
Davutoğlu’s past and who he is matters here. Davutoğlu was Erdoğan’s chief foreign policy adviser from 2003, foreign minister from 2009, and then chairman of the AKP and prime minister from August 2014 to May 2016. He was the intellectual architect of the government’s foreign policy. He was hand-picked by Erdoğan for the premiership.
He was pushed out in May 2016 as Erdoğan moved to replace the parliamentary system with an executive presidency — a shift Davutoğlu resisted. He left the AKP in 2019 and founded the Future Party that December, joining the opposition bloc that contested the 2023 elections.
However, that rupture had already cost him. Within weeks of his leaving the AKP in September 2019, a state bank moved against İstanbul Şehir University, founded by the foundation Davutoğlu co-founded and once led. Its accounts were frozen, its licence suspended six days after he launched his party, and its founding foundation placed under trustees. Erdoğan personally signed the decision closing the university in June 2020. The campus reverted to the Treasury. In 2023 the Constitutional Court found the legal mechanism used to close it unconstitutional.
The timing of today’s investigation is the point. Davutoğlu withdrew from party politics on 29 July this year, saying he would not be part of a contaminated political climate. On 22 August his party voted itself out of existence. Two weeks later, prosecutors opened a file on a speech from 2021.
A former prime minister of the governing party is now under investigation for words he spoke while in opposition, just weeks after leaving politics altogether.
