The failure of democracy in Turkey

Turkey has been experiencing a deepening political crisis over the past years with a dramatic erosion of its rule of law and democracy framework. While Turkey is officially a presidential republic, Erdogan has been consolidating power in recent years.

Indeed, analysts believe that Turkey's decline will mostly stem from Erdogan’s personalization of institutions and control of the military’s political power after the attempted coup of July 2016.

Turkey under Erdogan is reverting to autocracy. Executive aggrandizement slowly slides the state towards autocracy as often the call to change by opposition and movement leaders is not loud enough because the majority supports the already taken route.

Turkey has been adopting the culture that accepts “big man rule", hence, Erdogan’s government is less attached to civil liberties and rights that are associated with liberal democracy. 

Additionally, the adoption of exclusionary policies has polarized the society, specifically after the July 2016 coup attempt that complicated the efforts to preserve shared democratic values.

The crushing of the opposition by Erdogan and the transformation to a heavily centralized presidential system has further crushed checks and balances.

Indeed, experts argue that Turkey has taken a turn towards authoritarianism, specifically with the series of consecutive autocratic laws, reforms and events that have taken place for the last decade.

The process of autocratization in Turkey can be summed up in the various institutional changes and a number of contingent and informal changes starting from the June 2015 parliamentary elections, the 2016 attempted coup d’état, and the 2017 referendum.

This autocratization is fundamentally related to the concentration of executive power in the figure of president Erdogan and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) since 2012, which has manifested itself as the longest period of a party’s continuous rule in Turkey since 1950.

Furthermore, some reports highlight the corruption alleged by Erdogan and his close associates in increasing the state’s power and insulating its accountability.

The new reform of the electoral law, which brought forward the elections to June 2018 instead of November 2018, embodied a political strategy that gave more control over ballot stations to the government officials vis-á-vis party representatives.

Moreover, the jailing of various deputies, mayors, journalists, policemen, teachers and the opposition, in general, has significantly affected the quality of democracy; in other words, the system Erdogan created, managed to establish a dysfunctional government in terms of civil liberties and rights.