Abstract
This year’s mayoral elections in Turkey have been testing the country’s checks and balances.
Five weeks before, the Istanbul election was won narrowly by an opposition candidate, and observers had hoped that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ability to cope with an opposition in Istanbul was a good sign for the future of the country. The council was ruling on an appeal by Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP). For those who wondered whether the country retained separation of powers a year after implementing a new presidential system, the Turkish judiciary’s apparent subservience to the government now provided a clear answer. It did not.
Next year, Turks will celebrate 100 years since Turkey’s parliament opened its doors for the first time but, as that historic day approaches, the country retains little separation of its powers.
As executive president, Erdogan heads Turkey’s largest political party, handles foreign policy and enjoys the support of three-quarters of the Turkish media, which is run by loyalist tycoons.
Employees of the national news agency Anadolu and the public broadcaster TRT receive their pay-cheques from his office, and all key appointments in the judiciary are made from the presidential palace. Lawmakers complain that the parliament has become a ghost building and lost its significance. But although the president appears to have parliament, the media and the courts under his thumb, 2019 has emerged as the year that his one-man rule started to be challenged.
The real challenge emerged during the mayoral elections. Erdogan held 102 rallies over 50 days during that campaign, but his party lacks any other charismatic politicians, and victories were won by opposition parties in Turkey’s most prosperous and largest three cities.
But in the aftermath of the elections, problems caused by the concentration of power in the presidential palace came to the fore.
First, Anadolu, which broadcast results on election night, faced a conundrum. The difference between mayoral candidates in Istanbul was smaller than three-tenths of one percentage point, and the opposition candidate was winning. In order not to upset the government, Anadolu’s director, a former adviser to Erdogan, stopped updating the results. By noon the next day, Anadolu still refused to publish the outcome, but that position soon became untenable.
A week later, Turkey’s governing party applied to the high election board for a re-run of local elections. An even bigger dilemma emerged as the AKP proposed a live-streamed recount of ballots in front of the TRT cameras.
As they waited for the board’s decision, many Turks were left in the dark about the political machinations. Would state institutions function without prejudice? Did the judiciary actually have independence?
Supporters of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu clash with police during a protest in May 2019. The mayor from a Turkish opposition party narrowly won the election and now the supreme electoral council has ordered it be run again
CREDIT: Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty
There were some indications of change. In April 2019, shortly after the mayoral elections, a pro-government columnist proposed that mayors should be appointed without elections, because they slowed down Turkey’s progress. The Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who closed the fledgling parliament and took over control in 1878, is being celebrated as an ideal statesman by some.
On 25 April, cartoonist Musa Kart and half a dozen other journalists from Cumhuriyet, Turkey’s oldest newspaper, were imprisoned, handing themselves into authorities, after appeals against their convictions for terrorism-related charges failed. Then on 2 May, the Turkish constitutional court found that arrest and detention of Cumhuriyet journalists Akin Atalay, Murat Sabuncu, Ahmet §ik (now an MP) and Bülent Utku did not violate their rights to freedom of expression and liberty. Turkish prosecutors accused the journalists of aiding both the Gülen religious movement,
which the government blames for the 2016 coup attempt, and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). §ik previously published a book criticising the Güllenist movement.
Alican Uludağ, a star legal reporter on the newspaper, also fell victim to this crumbling of powers. In 2017, his reporting about a prosecutor resulted in a 10-month prison sentence; last year, during the trial of an American pastor imprisoned in Turkey, Uludağ’s reporting on political interference in the court case again got him into trouble. A police investigation charged him with “denigrating the Turkish state”.
Uludağ finds the disintegration of Turkey’s separation of powers alarming. “There is no judicial independence or impartiality in Turkey,” he told Index. “Instead, the government controls courts which silence journalists who scrutinise power. Judges and prosecutors act like members of the ruling party.”
He points to how synchronised the executive and the judiciary have become. “Members of the judiciary talk admiringly about this synchronisation,” he said.
This is not unprecedented. Multi-party politics began in 1950 after six centuries of sultanates, with intermittent attempts at representative democracy. The Ottoman Parliament opened for the first time in 1877 and was shut down a year later. It reopened in 1908, and was shut down again in 1920.
Although Turkey’s current parliament opened in 1920, it took three decades to implement a multi-party system with free elections. The current opposition party, the CHP, held power for the republic’s first 30 years.
When the AKP rose to power, in 2002, its leaders advocated to transform Turkish politics along European lines, and pledged to build a system of checks and balances. Sixteen years later, there is little trace of these promises.
In Uludağ’s view, the erosion of the separation of powers strips legal protections from Turkish journalists and he says a “climate of fear” hangs over the judiciary.
“Judges and prosecutors fear expulsion or exile,” he said. “When the judiciary can’t protect itself, it can’t protect journalists, either.”
Uludağ believes the judiciary faces a choice: “They can act as defenders of the government, which took a hit during the elections, or they can clear this climate of fear by protecting freedoms.”
Turkey’s problems with its separation of powers have been long in the making. In 2016, the EU’s Turkey rapporteur, Kati Piri, proclaimed: “There is no separation of powers between the government and the president”, adding: “A system without any checks and balances at a moment when we see those political developments and at the same time that the rule of law is deteriorating in the country is certainly not bringing Turkey closer to Europe.”
Since 2006, an independent German foundation, Bertelsmann Stiftung, has been analysing the health of democracies worldwide. Its 2018 report found that the country where separation of powers was the most worrying was Turkey.
In 2019, it ranked 109th in a list of 113 countries in the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index.
Ironically, the AKP was founded in 2001 on a critique of Turkey’s democratic deficit and its lack of separation of powers. The leaders of the AKP called themselves conservative democrats, pledging to fight Turkey’s antidemocratic foundations.
But a decade ago the party’s tone began to shift.
“Since ErDoğan’s clash with Shimon Peres in 2009’s World Economic Forum over Israel’s offensive against Gaza, we clearly saw the emergence of a new AKP,” Taner Doğan, a member of the Chatham House think-tank and an assistant professor from Ibn Haldun University, told Index.
As part of his doctoral studies at City University, London, Doğan examined shifts in the AKP’s political communication strategies between 2002 and 2017, through interviews with party officials, think-tanks and academics close to the government.
In Doğan’s view, Mohamed Morsi’s ousting in Egypt, the Gezi Park protests in Turkey in 2013, and a failed coup attempt against Er-Doğan in 2016 altered the party’s language.
“The lukewarm support of Western countries during the coup became serious ammunition the government used in election campaigns. Nowadays, belief in democracy in Turkey is waning fast, and ErDoğan’s symbolic ascension to leadership of the Muslim world is built on a political narrative countering Israel, Western democracies and the international media.”
But Uludağ remains hopeful and says separation of powers is “as vital as bread and water”. In his view, the way out of the current crisis is simple: “If judges and prosecutors only follow the constitution, which says the judiciary must be independent and impartial, we will be able to breathe a sigh of relief.”