From Dual Republic to Totalitarian State

From Dual Republic to Totalitarian State:The Counterrevolution in Turkey 2007–2021 Aysen Candaş (bio) "we will make the copenhagen criteria, ankara's criteria." on December 12, 2002, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was then prime minister of Turkey, said this during his speech at the weekly meeting of the AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi), the Justice and Development Party (Hürriyet 2002). The European Union recognized Turkey's candidacy for membership in 1999, three years before the AKP came to power. The ruling government of 1999 and 2002 was a coalition of center-left, center-right, and ultranationalist-right parties. Against all odds, that government managed to ban the death penalty, design a liberalization and democratization package, and implement policies that conformed with the "Copenhagen criteria"—the EU's enlargement and accession criteria with which a country must comply in order to qualify for membership.1 Between 2002 and 2004, Erdoğan and his party followed the policies put into place by their predecessors and did not falter. Consequently, in 2004, the European Commission announced, "Turkey sufficiently fulfills the Copenhagen criteria" (Muftuler-Bac 2016, 64). Until 2007, the AKP maintained this course and even deepened Turkey's involvement with the EU by ratifying 14 constitutional amendments and implementing nine harmonization packages (Muftuler-Bac 2016, 66). Most significant among them was the 2004 [End Page 381] amendment to Article 90; the amended article prioritized Turkey's obligations under international human rights law and recognized the international law's supremacy. As Turkey is a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights (1950) and its amended protocols (1998), the amended Article 90 constrained Turkey by the criteria set forth by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Some constitutional lawyers called it "the silent revolution" of Turkey (Gonenc and Esen 2006). Turkey's political regime has been a moving target since roughly 2007, although, retrospectively speaking, we can say that political Islam's rise to power started after the 1980 coup and finally culminated in the capture of the political center in 2002. The 2017 referendum changed Turkey's political system from a parliamentary democracy to an unbridled presidency, granting the executive-president the effective unification of all powers in his person. The president now can issue decrees on any subject and holds the power to dissolve the parliament. But these facts refer merely to Turkey's political system. Its political regime is a broader issue. The political regime not only involves the separation or unification of powers, and checks and balances or the lack thereof, but also covers the totality of the state's coercive and sanctioning capabilities, the ends of the state, and what the state does with its capabilities. The AKP has been relentlessly practicing what it can maximally do and how far it can exercise the coercive and sanctioning powers of state institutions for the past 14 years. As a result of these "efforts," the new political regime has been constructed piece by seemingly incongruous piece. Observing a similar phenomenon in Viktor Orban's Hungary, Scheppele (2013) called this piecemeal engineering style the "Frankenstate." For the most part, the AKP has built and established its new institutional character behind the scenes, secretly or under false pretenses. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's AKP came to power in 2002, having received 34.3 percent of the votes in an election with a 79 percent participation rate. The 34.3 percent of the vote granted the AKP a 66 percent [End Page 382] representation in the parliament.2 At that time, the parliament was the legislative body of a parliamentary system, and a delegative or tutelary (Özbudun and Yazici 2004) or hybrid (Diamond 2015) but still a democratizing political regime. Several questions immediately arise. First, how could Erdoğan and his AKP manage to make a remarkable U-turn from the 2004 amendment to the counterrevolution under the same leadership? Second, exactly when did it start to happen? What were the significant ruptures that transformed the political system? What is the nature of the new political regime that was put in place by 2021? The first question is political and highly charged, and in Turkey, how one responds to

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• The ‘competitive authoritarian’ turn in Turkey

  Düzgün Arslantaş, Andrea Kaiser•Third World Quarterly•2023

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