{"id":69962,"date":"2013-04-24T22:17:02","date_gmt":"2013-04-24T19:17:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/?p=69962"},"modified":"2014-01-08T11:33:04","modified_gmt":"2014-01-08T09:33:04","slug":"turkey-no-checks-few-balances","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2013\/04\/24\/turkey-no-checks-few-balances\/","title":{"rendered":"Turkey: No Checks, Few Balances"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Steven A. Cook\u00a0<\/span><\/h1>\n

April 23, 2013<\/p>\n

\n
\"TurkeyPharaoh\"<\/div>\n
Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu addresses the media as he is flanked by his deputies at the Turkish Parliament in Ankara (Umit Bektas\/Courtesy Reuters).<\/div>\n

\u201cRecep Tayyip Erdogan is Turkey\u2019s first Pharaoh!\u201d a contact in Turkey declared to me recently over breakfast in Ankara.\u00a0 \u201cNot a Sultan?,\u201d I countered teasingly.\u00a0 \u201cNo, the Sultans had some checks on their power.\u00a0 Today Tayyip Erdogan\u2019s power is absolute.\u201d\u00a0 My friend, who would fall within the category of right-of-center nationalist, assured me that his Pharaoh comment was not meant to be an insult, but rather a statement of fact.\u00a0\u00a0 That\u2019s hard to believe given what the leaders of ancient (and not so ancient) Egypt stood for and the principles by which Erdogan and his associates claim to have governed Turkey for the last almost eleven years.\u00a0 Indeed, when Erdogan, Abdullah G\u00fcl, and the people around them broke from Turkey\u2019s Islamist old guard and established the\u00a0Adelet ve Kalkinma Partisi<\/em>\u00a0(Justice and Development Party, AKP) they offered Turks a vision of a democratic and prosperous Turkey.<\/p>\n

Between 2002 and 2007, the Justice and Development Party, first under Abdullah G\u00fcl\u2019s brief tenure as prime minister and then Erdogan, delivered on both.\u00a0 In those five years, the Turkish economy grew an average of over 6 percent annually and the AKP-dominated Grand National Assembly passed a range of significant political reforms that resulted in the European Union\u2019s official invitation to begin negotiations to join that exclusive club of democracies.\u00a0 It seemed clear that by the time AKP won 47 percent of the vote in the July<\/strong>2007 elections, the Islamists (they prefer \u201cconservative democrats\u201d)\u00a0had actually done what the \u00a0country\u2019s secular nationalists had only claimed to do\u2014which was in the words of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, \u201craise Turkey to the level of civilization\u201d through the modernization and democratization of Turkish political institutions. The AKP also invested in services for Turkey\u2019s middle and lower classes, who value the advances in transportation and healthcare as much, if not more, than the successful efforts to subordinate the military to civilian leaders, for example.<\/p>\n

Since 2007, however, AKP\u2019s reform efforts have slowed and in some areas there have been notable reversals, especially when it comes to freedom of expression.\u00a0 Moreover, the party has become a machine par excellence with its connections to media outlets, business, and government contractors,\u00a0 which only bolster its monopoly on political power at the local and national levels.\u00a0 A decade after assuming power, Prime Minister Erdogan is the sun around which Turkish politics revolves\u2014a fact he both knows and seems to relish. He seldom seems to wrestle with a decision, enjoys swatting away questions from observers who clearly \u201cdo not pay close enough attention,\u201d and brooks no criticism from an opposition that he does not take seriously.<\/p>\n

Of these, the latter is the most salient politically, but there is very little reason for Prime Minister Erdogan to give his primary opponents\u2014the Republican People\u2019s Party (CHP) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP)\u2014much in the way of respect.\u00a0 The CHP has 135<\/strong>seats in the Grand National Assembly and the MHP controls 53 mandates in the 550 seat parliament.\u00a0 These may seem like a lot, but the vote totals for both parties are confined to specific regions of the country (the Aegean coast and European parts of Turkey for the CHP and mostly I\u011fdir province\u00a0<\/strong>for the MHP) whereas AKP has significant cross-regional appeal and thus enjoys a parliamentary majority of 327 seats.\u00a0\u00a0 More importantly, while both parties have become adept at complaining about Prime Minister Erdogan and criticizing the AKP, they are unable to articulate an alternative vision for Turkey\u2019s future.\u00a0 I have a good understanding of what the CHP and MHP are against, but I have a harder time understanding precisely what they are for.\u00a0 I\u2019m willing to allow for the fact that I might be missing something in translation, but it seems that millions of Turkish voters are also confused.<\/p>\n

The inability to offer Turks a vision goes hand in hand with what seems like a strong aversion to modernize their internal structures and political processes.\u00a0 Take the CHP, for example.\u00a0 As I was departing Turkey on Saturday, the papers reported that the party\u2019s Deputy Chairman, G\u00fclseren Onan\u00e7, was forced to resign.\u00a0 Ms. Onan\u00e7 is a young, well-educated, successful businesswoman who was responsible for CHP\u2019s public relations.\u00a0 Her crime?\u00a0 She appeared on a television program against the expressed wishes of party chairman Kemal Kili\u00e7daro\u011flu and dared suggest that 65 percent of the CHP\u2019s grassroots support the government\u2019s efforts to bring the war with the Kurdistan Worker\u2019s Party (known as the PKK)\u2014a terrorist group that has waged a campaign of violence in Turkey since 1984 that has cost 40,000 lives\u2014to an end through negotiations.\u00a0 In other words, Onan\u00e7 was doing her job, but in the CHP\u2019s patriarchal politics, nothing happens unless Kili\u00e7daro\u011flu says so.\u00a0\u00a0It was not too long ago that analysts regarded Kili\u00e7daro\u011flu to be the savior of the CHP, which was reeling from a sex scandal and poor electoral performances.\u00a0 There have not been any more illicit videos of CHP officials, but further loss of momentum for the party has marked Kili\u00e7daro\u011flu\u2019s tenure.\u00a0 On the substance of what Onan\u00e7 said, it seems clear that the party leadership would rather censure one of its potential future leaders than take part in a process that may finally bring peace to Turkey.\u00a0 Either Kili\u00e7daro\u011flu and the people around him do not want to bring the conflict to an end because of an attachment to an ethnic based nationalism (a problem also among Kurdish opponents of peace) or they see it as a wedge issue.\u00a0 Either way, Onan\u00e7\u2019s dismissal reflects a political party that has yet to come to grips with how much Turkey has changed.\u00a0 The old truths and myths no longer apply in a more complex and differentiated society whose people want more than the drab political conformity that Kemalism (and the CHP) demand.\u00a0 The AKP surely wants to take credit for Turkey\u2019s transformation, but it was happening well before Erdogan and G\u00fcl defied their mentors way back in 2001.<\/p>\n

This all brings us back to Erdogan and his alleged Pharaoh-ness.\u00a0 Not to diminish either Erdogan\u2019s achievements or his faults but the desultory state of the opposition has no doubt contributed to his mastery of the political arena.\u00a0 I know Turks who don\u2019t share AKP\u2019s views on a variety of issues, but nevertheless vote for the party because they have no other real choice.\u00a0 Others choose not to vote.\u00a0 Without any viable options among the opposition an important check on Erdogan and the AKP does not exist, which does not bode well for the consolidation of democracy in Turkey.\u00a0 When journalists are jailed, corporations are punished with huge tax levies because their owners are deemed unfriendly to the AKP, and the courts are used to dole out political payback, it is the fault of Erdogan and his party\u2019s other leaders whose authoritarian tendencies are clear, but it also the \u00a0responsibility of Turkey\u2019s other political parties who are all at once ineffective, insular, and feckless, rendering them trivial in Turkey\u2019s fascinating transformation.<\/p>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Steven A. Cook\u00a0 April 23, 2013 Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu addresses the media as he is flanked by his deputies at the Turkish Parliament in Ankara (Umit Bektas\/Courtesy Reuters). \u201cRecep Tayyip Erdogan is Turkey\u2019s first Pharaoh!\u201d a contact in Turkey declared to me recently over breakfast in Ankara.\u00a0 \u201cNot a Sultan?,\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":69963,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[4102],"class_list":["post-69962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-turkey","tag-kilicdaroglu"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69962"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69962\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}