Turkey’s new presidential system will officially enter into force on Monday. That will give President Recep Tayyip Erdogan powers that no democratically elected leader of Turkey has ever had.
By DW
On July 9, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will take his oath of office in parliament. Turkey will thus officially move from a parliamentary system to a presidential system. Just 13 years have passed since Turkish officials started EU accession negotiations. At the time, it seemed that democracy, freedom of expression and social harmony were growing.
Now, however, Turkey is preparing to endow its increasingly Islamist, nationalist and authoritarian president with an unprecedented amount of power. The abolition of parliamentary control gives Erdogan sole power over the executive branch of government. And, through his power to appoint important judges, he will also control the judiciary.
Ersin Kalaycioglu, a senior scholar at Sabanci University’s Istanbul Policy Center, said the potential consequences remained unclear. “So far, the new system has only been discussed with us in broad lines,” Kalaycioglu said. “This means that neither the public nor political scientists know the exact details.”
Erdogan has repeatedly stressed that other democracies also have presidential systems. However, Turkey’s differs considerably from the US’s, as well as from France’s, semipresidential system of government. In the United States, for example, the president does not have the power to dissolve Congress.
Erdogan, on the other hand, can dissolve parliament and call elections. In France, parliament appoints the members of the Constitutional Court. In Turkey, on the other hand, the president makes the decisions concerning the high court.
Kalaycioglu points out that Turkey’s presidential system caters to autocratic tendencies. “There is a strong civil society in both the US and French systems,” he said. “We don’t have that.”
Erdogan will now also be able to regularly issue presidential decrees. He had previously only been allowed to do so under the rules of the ongoing state of emergency since the failed July 2016 coup. Erdogan will now be able to overrule the judiciary at any time.
The oversight of an independent and impartial judiciary will therefore be effectively impossible. The political scientist Dogu Ergil shares Kalaycioglu’s fears. He believes that the separation of powers and the independence of the judiciary have been abolished.