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Turkey

The only way to save Turkish democracy is a competent opposition

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If the opponents of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan hope to unlock his increasingly autocratic grip on power, they need to join forces, then work to divide the ruling AKP.

It’s a bridge too far to say that the Turkish opposition is responsible for a decade and a half of losses to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

But there’s no doubt that his opponents certainly haven’t posed an effective brake on Erdoğan’s accelerating chokehold on Turkish democracy.

Turkish voters, according to official tallies, narrowly approved sweeping changes to the Turkish constitution on April 16 that bring far more powers to the Turkish presidency with far fewer checks and balances against the newly empowered executive.

This was always Erdoğan’s plan.

It was his plan in August 2014, when the longtime prime minister stood for (and won) the presidency, introducing a de facto presidential system in Turkey. Prime minister Binali Yıldırım essentially serves at the pleasure of the Turkish president today.

It was his plan last weekend, when he won (or possibly stole) a victory for a de jure presidential system through 18 separate constitutional amendments, many of which take effect in 2019 with a likely joint parliamentary and presidential election. Most immediately, however, Erdoğan will be able to drop the façade of presidential independence and return to lead the party that he already controls indirectly. (It’s a step that apparently won praise, almost alone among Atlantic leaders, from US president Donald Trump and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán.)

It was his plan when, after the longtime ruling Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP, the Justice and Development Party) failed to win an outright majority in June 2015, he plotted a crackdown on the Kurdish minority — after years of progress in integrating Kurds by relaxing restrictive and counterproductive restrictions on Kurdish language and culture — to engineer a majority win in a new round of elections five months later. Continue reading The only way to save Turkish democracy is a competent opposition →

Turkey

In blow to Turkish media, Erdoğan seizes critical Zaman newspaper

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The Turkish government took control of opposition-friendly newspaper Zaman late last week. (Zaman)
The Turkish government took control of opposition-friendly newspaper Zaman late last week. (Zaman)

With much of Europe focused on a deal with Turkey to stem the flow of Syrian refugees into the European Union, the critical Middle Eastern country took another large step toward illiberalism over the weekend.Turkey

Following a court order, riot police on Friday took control of the country’s Zaman newspaper, with by far the highest circulation in Turkey. Police forcibly entered the news offices on Friday, firing its editor, Abdülhamit Bilici, and using tear gas to dispel any lingering protests from reporters and readers who might oppose one of the most shamelessly heavy-handed attacks on press freedom in Turkish history.

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RELATED: The fight for Turkey is between Erdoganists and Gulenists

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To put this in perspective, Poland’s opposition and much of the European elite rang alarms late last year when the new, conservative Polish government pushed to take aggressive control of the state media.

By contrast, the Turkish government has now taken one of the country’s most important private newspapers. On Monday, the newly government-owned Zaman was already taking a chillingly pro-government line. (Oddly, as of late Monday night, the English-language edition’s website was still up).  Continue reading In blow to Turkish media, Erdoğan seizes critical Zaman newspaper →

Turkey

Turkish election a referendum on Erdoğan-style presidentialism

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You will not find the name of Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, on any ballot during the June 7 Turkish general election.Turkey

Make no mistake, however — Sunday’s vote is nothing short of a referendum on Erdoğan’s 12-year rule, creeping authoritarianism, mild (and sometimes not-so-mild) Islamism and, above all, his plans to change the Turkish constitution to redistribute more power to the presidency and away from the legislature.

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RELATED: How Turkey’s Kurds became a key constituency in election

RELATED: Erdoğan  wins first-round presidential victory

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Barring a surprise, however, Erdoğan and the ruling Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP, the Justice and Development Party) will almost certainly fail to win the two-thirds majority of seats in the 550-member Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi (Grand National Assembly) to impose constitutional reforms. So long as the AKP controls the Turkish parliament, however, Erdoğan will almost certainly dominate national policymaking. Prime minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, who previously served as foreign minister, is a loyal Erdoğan ally, and Erdoğan has started culling other senior members of the party, leaving a chiefly pliant set of AKP officials who owe their political careers to Erdoğan.

There are three key numbers to watch:

  • 330 is the number of seats Erdoğan and Davutoğlu need to push through unilateral constitutional change.
  • 311 is the number of seats the AKP currently holds.
  • 276 is the number of seats that constitutes a majority.

If the AKP wins 330 or more seats, it will be a surprising and astounding victory, despite a slowing economy and growing disenchantment with Erdoğan’s rule, as Constanze Letsch writes for Politico EU:

Firat Inci, a 32-year-old restaurant owner from the southeastern city of Siirt, has supported the AKP for years. This time, he intends to vote for the opposition. “The name of our ruling party is Justice and Development, isn’t it?” says Inci. “But they haven’t been able to deliver justice, and the development we have seen under this government has been nothing if not unjust.”

Over the years, the AKP has come to resemble the corrupt, authoritarian Kemalist regime it once unlodged — by the end of the last decade, prudent caution slipped into outright paranoia. Erdoğan and his allies began using the levers of government, through the Ergenekon trials, to prosecute opposition and military leaders, before turning on one-time allies, including secular allies, Islamic ‘Gulenists,’ and even top AKP figures like former president Abdullah Gül.

Despite glowing reviews for the Turkish economy, which liberalized and modernized under the AKP’s first two terms in power, corruption and rising debt have magnified the fact that Turkey’s galloping economic growth slowed to 4.1% in 2013 and to merely 2.9% in 2014.

If the AKP wins less than 276 seats, there’s a chance that Turkey’s opposition parties can form a coalition — or that the AKP will be forced to find a governing partner, the first time that Turkey will face a hung parliament since the 1999 elections.

The problem is that though Turks may be souring on Erdoğan, they are none too enamored of the other choices, either. Continue reading Turkish election a referendum on Erdoğan-style presidentialism →

Turkey

Can Abdullah Gül save Turkish democracy?

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On Thursday, Abdullah Gül, Turkey’s last indirectly elected president, will leave office after seven years.Turkey

Officially, he’ll have no role in either Turkey’s government or in the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP, the Justice and Development Party) that his successor, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, leads and that Gül himself co-founded with Erdoğan in 2001. 

Erdoğan’s victory in Turkey’s first direct presidential election on August 11 cleared the way for his plans to transform Turkey’s government into a presidential system, the culmination of years of gradual centralization since Erdoğan first became Turkey’s prime minister in 2003. 

Though Erdoğan will officially step down from any formal party and political role, he has made clear that he expects, unofficially, to direct both party and policy from his new perch at Çankaya Köşkü, the Turkish presidential palace, as the powerful leader of what he calls the ‘new Turkey.’ He’ll do so at first as a de facto leader. Late last week, the AKP chose Ahmet Davutoğlu, Turkey’s foreign minister since 2009, as its new AKP leader and, accordingly, Turkey’s new prime minister. In that role, Davutoğlu is widely expected to follow Erdoğan’s lead in governing Turkey. 

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RELATED: Erdogan wins first-round presidential victory

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That leaves Gül, perhaps the only figure in the AKP more popular than Erdoğan, as one of the few people in Turkey who have enough political strength to stand up to his successor. 

A year ago, the conventional wisdom was that Gül would trade places with Erdoğan and become prime minister, an office that Gül held briefly during the first four months of the AKP’s government. When the Islamists first won the 2002 elections, Erdoğan was still subject to a ban on his involvement in politics that the new government soon lifted. When Erdoğan subsequently became eligible for the premiership, Gül became Turkey’s deputy prime minister and foreign minister, launching Turkey’s accession talks with the European Union in 2005 and asserting a greater Turkish presence in the Middle East. 

Despite some controversy over the rise of an Islamist to the Turkish presidency, Gül easily won the vote in Turkey’s National Assembly in 2007. As head of state, Gül generally observed presidential impartiality, though he courted controversy when he became the first Turkish president to visit Armenia and condemned Israel after it attacked an aid flotilla destined for Gaza in 2010.

But Gül also chided Erdoğan’s response to 2012 protests, which began over plans to build a new mosque in place of Gezi Park in downtown Istanbul and grew to encompass the growing authoritarian manner of Erdoğan’s government. In particular, Gül directly criticized police forces for the brutality deployed against largely peaceful protesters. Gül further argued that democracy requires liberal freedoms and the rule of law, comments that further distanced Gül from Erdoğan. Gül also strongly resisted Erdoğan’s short-lived attempt to restrict Turkish access to Twitter in the prelude to March’s local elections. 

Despite Erdoğan’s presidential victory, Turkey remains polarized over his leadership. Critics argue that Turkey is moving away from European-style democracy toward a more centralized style more reminiscent of Vladimir Putin’s rule in Russia. Though many moderates and secular Turks welcomed Erdoğan’s rise over a decade ago, when he effectively thwarted the corrupt secular leadership that ruled in tandem with a coup-prone military that routinely harassed political Islamists. But they increasingly worry that Erdoğan is so completely consolidating power that he’s becoming an arguably larger threat to Turkish democracy.

Gül has indicated his disapproval of Erdoğan’s plans and, in his farewell address as president, Gül pointedly defended his impartiality, decried political polarization and otherwise emphasized and his commitment to the rule of law, press and personal freedoms, the impartiality and independence of the judiciary and a secular state balanced by the freedom of religion.

Continue reading Can Abdullah Gül save Turkish democracy? →

Turkey

Erdogan wins first-round presidential victory

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Ultimately, neither Gulenists nor Kemalists nor anyone else could stand in the way of Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in his quest to become Turkey’s first directly elected president. Turkey

But his victory in yesterday’s presidential election wasn’t exactly surprising — the only question was whether Erdoğan (pictured above) would win the presidency outright on August 10 or whether he would advance to a potential August 24 runoff against the second-place challenger, former diplomat Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu.

As it turns out, Erdoğan narrowly won in the first round with around 51.79% of the vote:

turkey14

Though the election’s outcome wasn’t really in doubt, Erdoğan’s future and the direction of Turkey’s political structure remain much cloudier. Vowing a ‘new era’ in his victory speech, Erdoğan’s  ambition to remain the most powerful figure in Turkish politics is hardly a secret, even though the presidency has been a ceremonial office since the 1961 constitution. That means his presidential victory now presents at least three difficult questions for which we won’t have answers anytime soon.

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RELATED: Can Erdoğan be stopped in
first direct Turkish presidential election?

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In light of Turkey’s role as a key fulcrum in international affairs, straddling the European Union to the west, with which it shares a custom union, and increasingly exerting its influence in the Middle East to the east, with mixed effect in Iraq, Syria and Iraqi Kurdistan.  Continue reading Erdogan wins first-round presidential victory →

14 in 14, Turkey

14 in 2014: Turkey presidential election

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10. Turkey presidential election, expected in July.Turkey

Turkey will choose its first directly elected president in summer 2014, and it’s long been assumed that the country’s controversial prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the leader of the ruling Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP, Justice and Development Party), wants the position.

With a record of strong economic growth over the past decade, the presidency just a few months ago seemed like it was Erdoğan’s for the asking.  Having vanquished the old Kemalist order — wherein the Turkish military ‘guaranteed’ Turkish democracy by overthrowing Islamists that it didn’t like — Erdoğan showed promise in his early years as prime minister as a leader with the ability to revitalize Turkish political life and to transform Turkey into a truly representative democracy.

But 2013 may become the year in which Erdoğan lost the magic touch with respect to ruling Turkey — the year in which the world finally took notice that he crossed the line from populist democracy into soft authoritarianism, though the signs were always there for anyone to see in the way that his government slowly squeezed out political rivals (most notably through the series of politically motivated ‘Ergenekon’ trials).  His heavy-handed response to the Gezi Park demonstrations in May/June 2013 and the use of force to disperse protestors near Taksim Square showed that Erdoğan’s real weakness wasn’t creeping Islamism within Turkey so much as his disdain for liberal democracy.

Though the Turkish presidency is largely a ceremonial position, with a handful of constitutional duties and other roles in representing Turkey to the rest of the world, Erdoğan hasn’t been shy about indicating his interest in holding the same office that the founder of the modern Turkish state, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, also once held.  He hasn’t also been shy about his interest in amending Turkey’s constitution to transform it into a more powerful US-style presidency.

As the leading figure within Turkey’s ruling party, Erdoğan would have become a president with extraordinary powers, appointing in his place a pliant prime minister — not unlike the relationship that the Russian or French president has with their respect prime ministers when the presidential party holds a parliamentary majority as well.

But within the past couple of weeks, Erdoğan has faced a new internal threat in the form of a corruption crisis that’s already led to the resignation of three members of his cabinet, causing an internal rift within Turkey’s Islamist camp between Erdoğan loyalists and a cabal of Gulenists, the followers of Fethullah Gülen, a Turkish cleric who lives in Pennsylvania in self-exile.  He leads the Hizmet movement, which boasts the support of around 1 million Turks, including many members of the Turkish bureaucracy, security forces and judiciary.

Turkey’s main opposition party, the Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (CHP, the Republican People’s Party), is in no shape to win the presidency — even if the AKP hadn’t tilted the political playing field so much in its own favor, the CHP would already have been hampered by weak leadership and its image as the remnants of the old Kemalist order.

So what is Erdoğan to do?  If he survives the latest crisis, he may still be able to claim the presidency, but he’ll need to make amends with the Gulenists and with other top members of his own party, who may believe it’s time for Erdoğan to move along quietly.  It’s possible that Abdullah Gül (pictured above), Turkey’s president since 2007, a former foreign minister and also a member of the ruling Justice and Development Party, could run for a second term instead.  While it was once thought that Gül and Erdoğan might switch places, with Gül becoming prime minister under an Erdoğan presidency, it may well be that Erdoğan limps on as prime minister through the June 2015 parliamentary elections, when the AKP chooses a new figure to attempt to lead it into its second decade in power.

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