“No one has the right to turn Turkey into a country of lions condemned to a vegetarian diet.”

Confused? In President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s usage, a lion subsisting on salad is like a country running old software even though it's got strong hardware. 

No?

Vegetarian lions and out-of-date software are the same as a shirt that’s too tight, to use another of Erdogan’s recent phrases. These colorful metaphors all boil down to one thing – that thing being the president’s determination to move Turkey away from the parliamentary system that he says has outlived its usefulness.

Since at least his election to the post in August 2014, Erdogan has been seeking to shift Turkey’s center of power to the presidency instead of parliament, expanding the scope of his powers in what had previously been more of a ceremonial role. 

That’s why Capital Economics’ Emerging Market Economist William Jackson places the president’s latest turns of phrase on a continuum with other expressions of his might, like the act ofedging out his prime minister that sent markets tumbling last week. The lion quip is an attempt to seize the momentum after Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu’s ouster and put constitutional reform back on the agenda. 

In an interview with Bloomberg, former presidential adviser Burhan Kuzu revealed that behind the scenes plans for political reform are in full swing. Turkey's ruling party may push for a "mini constitutional change package" that allows Erdogan to assume leadership of the ruling AKP in a transitional step on the way to an enhanced presidential system, he said yesterday. 

David Fuller's view

A confident Erdogan is dismantling Turkey’s previous advantage – a healthy democracy since the days of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, in an often troubled region of the globe.  For ‘Sultan’ Erdogan, democracy represents a tedious restraint on his superior leadership.  His confidence is bolstered by a fawning EU’s dependence on Turkey to take some of the Middle Eastern and North African refugees off their hands, albeit for a considerable price.