Erdogan: A People's President?

If the presidential elections produce a clear outcome in the first round, as anticipated, Turkey will have a new president on 11 August. The fact that the new president will be the first to be elected directly by popular vote is just as significant as the fact that Erdogan is the favoured candidate. There is a story behind this.

The last presidential elections were supposed to be held in 2007. The secular Kemalist elites exerted a great deal of effort to prevent a member of Erdogan’s party to be named the next president. Had the process took place as it should have, a candidate nominated by the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) would have been elected president by the members of the parliament. The laicist tutelage regime, having declared any such candidate would be unacceptable, simultaneously mobilised the judiciary and the military. On the eve of the elections, the military issued a proclamation that had the effect of a soft coup.

This has become known as the April 27th proclamation. Meanwhile, the judiciary had resorted to charlatanism. All of a sudden, a new rule was produced that 367 votes were required to confirm the president in a parliament with 550 seats. This rule had neither been seen nor heard of until then. Once the constitutional court supported this nonsense rule, it became impossible for the AK Party, which constituted more than half of the parliament but was just short of 367 votes to confirm the nominee.

Despite all these pressures, Erdogan managed to put his signature on a first in Turkish political history. In having responded to the military’s proclamation of 27 April, Erdogan became the first elected official to stand up to the military. This caused quite a shock in the tutelage regime, which had not anticipated a civil government to stand up to it. Until then, the civil governments had taken a step back every time the tutelage regime issued a warning. The military-judiciary tutelage regime had already conducted four coups, one of which was against Erdogan’s party in 1997. Erdogan’s resistance was unexpected. He not only resisted, but he moved fast to hold a referendum that would reform the presidential electoral laws. With the referendum, the country decided that, in August 2014, the president would be elected by direct popular vote for the first time in Turkey’s political history.

End of the tutelage regime

Now that presidential elections were to be decided by popular vote, the last fort of the tutelage regime that held the secular republic in a stronghold since its foundation had fallen. In other words, all public offices that are critical in the governance of the country are going to be elected by the public.

After the 1960 coup d’etat, the office of the president had been designed as a mechanism for the tutelage regime to reign in the elected civil governments. All critical decisions of governance at high-level bureaucratic positions required the president’s signature. From cabinet members to the members of the judiciary, from university presidents to high-level bureaucrats, all were impacted by a president who had not been elected by the people.

Since the responsibilities of the president were not defined by the constitution, it was difficult to initiate a discussion. A president elected by the people will put an end to the debate of the legitimacy of the president’s office for once and for all. It will be impossible for a president who is eligible to be elected for a second five-year term to ignore the people’s demands. A president will have to appeal to at least half of the country in order to be elected, to begin with. This system not only signals the end of the tutelage regime, but also makes it impossible for a Kemalist to be elected president.