On April 16th, Turkish voters will go to the polls to cast
their ballots in a referendum on whether to give (even more) extraordinary
powers to their current president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Or at least that is
the ostensible purpose of the plebiscite. But seen from a broader perspective, what
the Turkish people will be voting on is democracy itself.
The advances that Erdogan has made toward an autocratic takeover of
political power in Turkey over the past three years have been dizzying. Toward
the end of 2013, when he was still the country’s prime minister, it looked as
if his political career might melt down and end in scandal, after a series of
taped conversations appeared to leave no doubt that he and his son Bilal were
involved in a vast (and personally lucrative) network of corruption.
But clever and undeniably able politician that he is—with a career
spanning two decades, from his days as mayor of Istanbul—and armed with the
flourishing power that his profile as an ally of NATO and the West provided him
in times when western leaders could ill afford to snub a “friend” whose power
straddles the frontier between East and West, Erdogan was able to finesse his
way out of the corruption allegations and to come out stronger than ever,
winning the presidency the following year. From that point on, his main thrust
has been toward consolidating ever greater presidential power, and his clear
advances toward that goal have been in obvious detriment to democracy, with
both political critics and the independent media being marked as enemies of the
State and persecuted as such.
Throughout Turkey’s history as a republic, following the fall of the
400-year-long Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, the Turkish military
has acted as an arbiter and circuit-breaker any time that it has judged
democracy to be at risk. This is a legacy handed down to the Turkish Armed Forces
by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the Army officer who was instrumental in creating the
Turkish Republic in the years immediately following the First World War.
According to that tradition, known as Kemalism, the military has jealously
guarded its concept of Turkey as a nationalist, secular and western-leaning
democracy—even while imposing repeated modifications and limitations on the
system in order to rein in the ambitions of elected leaders and to prevent them
from accumulating undue power or dragging the government toward Islamist
theocracy.
No matter how democratic their interests have been, however, from a
practical standpoint, Turkish democracy has developed within the shadow of the
country’s powerful Armed Forces and with the tacit permission of its military
hierarchy. Until last year, it was unthinkable that any political leader could
effectively rule without the military’s approval. But the current president has
defied that belief as well.
Erdogan’s bent for audacious political and diplomatic brinksmanship had,
until recently, allowed him to exploit these democratic idiosyncrasies to
further his own causes and career, on the one side identifying himself with
moderate Islamist political lines, while on the other fortifying the country’s
status as a NATO power and as the number one “outsource” for Western Europe’s
refugee woes, as proxy wars in the Middle East and Africa have sparked the
worst migrant crisis since World War II.
And when the Turkish president’s less than democratic nature, his
flirtation with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin to spite the West for
disapproving of his heavy-handed tactics, and his apparent tolerance of ISIL
militants’ using the country as a point of safe passage dampened hopes of Turkey’s
being rewarded for its loyalty to the West with membership in the European
Union, a group of military leaders, further prompted by ISIL terrorist acts on
Turkish soil, decided enough was enough and took matters into their own hands.
On July 15th of last year, a determined segment of the
Turkish Armed Forces staged a lightning coup in which they sought to overthrow
the president and, as in other such military uprisings that have peppered the
country’s history, reorder the system and restore it to a semblance of secular
democracy. However, they apparently had not counted on the extent of both
popular and armed support that Erdogan enjoyed, and the coup was quickly
crushed. Thousands were immediately arrested and what followed has shaped up,
in the months since then, as a nationwide witch-hunt.
So far—due to European protests and official warnings that doing so
would further harm his ever shakier relations with the EU—Erdogan has been
unable to find the support necessary for reinstatement of capital punishment in
Turkey, which he sought shortly after the coup attempt. He was clearly hoping
to underscore his power through exemplary executions that would leave no doubt
as to how he would deal with any future challenges to his authority. Instead,
he has had to settle for other exemplary punitive actions: 40,000 arrests and
removal from their posts of judges, prosecutors, educators, and other
government employees suspected of backing the attempted overthrow, some 100,000
of them in total.
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| Protesters demonstrate for free press |
If the Turkish president was already coming under criticism prior to the
military uprising for his repressive actions against journalists and media who
were critical of his administration, since last year’s abortive coup, his
government has nearly obliterated freedom of expression across the country.
Erdogan has shut down nearly 180 periodicals, TV stations and websites. So
extensive have his attacks on the media been that Turkey is now ranked among
the worst repressors of independent news coverage. There are currently some 150
journalists being held by the government in Turkish jails.
So, how will Erdogan’s power be expanded and democracy curtailed if he
wins a majority “yes” vote in the April referendum? To start with, as president
or former president, the constitutional reform implicit in the plebiscite will
make him immune to prosecution for life. In other words, all accusations of
corruption formulated against him would suddenly become moot, as would any
other charges of wrongdoing. The office of the prime minister would be
abolished and presidents would be able to run for three consecutive terms of
five years each. (Presumably this would apply to the incumbent president as
well). Intelligence services would answer directly to the president. As head of
State, he would have the power to dissolve parliament and to determine the
country’s annual budget. And he would have veto power over any and all
legislation.
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| A poster promoting both democracy and militarism |
The president would, under the reform, also extend his reach to the
judiciary and to education. He would have the power to appoint all university
heads and to choose the director for the National Board of Higher Education.
The reform would give the president effective power over the appointment of all
judges and prosecutors by permitting him to name the head and half of the
members of the board that makes those appointments. And the head of State would
also be given the power to appoint 12 out of the 15 jurists serving on the
Turkish Constitutional Court, the country’s highest judicial body and the court
that decides whether or not impeachment proceedings can be brought against the
Executive.
In light of all this, the threat to Turkish democracy is obvious, and it
is also clear that Erdogan is unlikely to lose the referendum. Turks live in
the midst of hostile surroundings, with the devastating Syrian War being fought
just across the border, ISIL terrorists active in every direction and using
Turkish territory as a semi-safe haven, Russia bolstering its presence in the
region and the government engaged in a protracted undeclared war with Kurdish
rebels.
Within such an uncertain context—and with the country, according to many
observers, almost equally divided between those who adore the president and
those who hate him—many Turks see Erdogan as representing strength and
stability. Although his current ties with the West may be less cordial than
before, his opponents can lay no credible claim to the ability to maintain
continuing good relations with the EU and Washington. Furthermore, Erdogan has
proven his strength in military action that he has led in Syria, and in diplomatic
efforts that he has mounted there in conjunction with Russia. Secular
democratic activists mostly form part of the opposition, and although they have
drawn much of their thinking from European democracies, few any longer consider
as trustworthy the Western powers that have been cautiously ready to continue
to back the country’s autocratic leader over any attempt to unseat him.
The referendum is, to a certain extent, a big gamble for Erdogan. An overwhelming
“no” vote would seriously undermine his increasingly autocratic power base, and
might even garner internal support for a new uprising against him. But in the
final analysis, although preliminary polls indicate that the country is almost
evenly split between “yeas” and “nays” for the upcoming plebiscite, most
indications are that a majority, including many of the country’s up and coming
youth, are more interested in a “resilient” Turkey than a democratic one.
The April referendum, then, comes down to a test of strength between
those who want to keep Erdogan from wiping out all vestiges of democracy and
those willing to provide him with the authority he requires to become a
full-blown populist dictator.
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