A huge banner for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan goes up in Ankara, Turkey, on June 17, 2018. Qin Yanyang/Press Association. All rights reserved.
Turkish democracy has been in a slow motion crisis for some time now. Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is frequently mentioned in the same breath as Victor Orban, Rodrigo Duterte, and Vladimir Putin. His Justice and Development Party has been running the country under a state of emergency since the summer of 2016, using anti-terrorism and defamation laws to imprison large numbers of journalists, NGO workers and opposition politicians. Last year, the party won a referendum to grant major new powers for the president. In April this year, Erdoğan called a snap election to vote in the next president of Turkey. The most likely challenger is the CHP’s candidate Muharrem İnce who will have an uphill battle.
The “national willpower”
For the AKP the most important aspect of democracy is the vote, while separation of powers, freedom of the press and independent judiciary are regarded as irrelevant compared to the power of the “the national willpower” as the AKP catchphrase goes. A ballot victory is considered a carte blanche and that’s why elections still matter to the AKP as their sole source of legitimacy. However, their corrupt control of the media and willingness to stoop to all manner of dirty tricks (as seen in the 2015 election and 2017 referendum) means that elections are far from fair. A ballot victory is considered a carte blanche and that’s why elections still matter to the AKP as their sole source of legitimacy.
