Istanbul // Turkey’s referendum on Sunday is the most consequential poll of the Recep Tayyip Erdogan era, and possibly of the country’s modern history.
President Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) government are urging voters to back a series of constitutional reforms that would dramatically enhance the power of the presidency at the expense of the other branches of state.
In a country long wracked by political turmoil – in which the military has toppled four governments, and which only last year suffered a failed coup – supporters claim the changes will bring lasting stability and administrative efficiency.
However, the proposed reforms would in fact further entrench a principal cause of that instability: a domineering state that has always sought to shut large sections of the country’s diverse society out of the political process.
The rigidly-enforced secularism of Turkey’s former Kemalist elite was a means of stymying the country’s conservative majority. The existing ten per cent electoral threshold has been a means of suppressing Kurdish representation in parliament.
The unprecedented stability and prosperity of the AKP’s first decade in power was to a large degree due the government’s inclusivity — even if that inclusivity masked a deeper and more ugly power struggle.
Mr Erdogan gave a sense of empowerment to religious conservatives who had previously been marginalised; he reached out to the Kurds, and at the same time did not move to curtail the freedoms of the country’s secular middle class.
A decade ago, almost every section of Turkey’s society (except perhaps for the Kemalist elite whose grip on power was slipping) could believe it had a stake in the country’s future.
The past five years, however, have seen a dramatic and disastrous shift as Mr Erdogan has reacted to a series of challenges to his authority by tightening his grip on power and governing with an ever-narrowing circle of sycophantic advisers.
The nadir of this process has been marked by the breathtakingly broad crackdown on dissent that followed the July 15 coup attempt last year. Ruling by decree through a state of emergency that has now lasted nine months, the government has fired about 130,000 civil servants, detained 71,000 people, fired 6,000 academics, 4,000 judges and prosecutors, and 24,000 police officers.
The targets of these purges go far beyond the members of the Fethullah Gulen network, the Islamic movement that the government blames for the coup attempt, but have also targeted liberals, leftists, and Kurdish nationalists.
The proposed changes would do much to formalise this state of affairs. Under the new powers, the president could pass decrees with the force of law independently of parliament. He could declare a state of emergency without the currently required cabinet approval.
There are various judicial restraints on presidential power: if the president is suspected of a crime, parliament can order an investigation with a simple majority vote and refer him to the constitutional court with a two-thirds majority vote.
However, the president will appoint a majority of the constitutional court’s members, raising doubts about the future judiciary’s impartiality. In theory the president is subject to a two-term limit, but would also have the power to dissolve parliament, in the event of which the incumbent would be able to run again.
If the proposals pass, the effect would be to consolidate control of the state in the hands of Turkey’s political right. The left, which has never won an outright majority in any Turkish election, as well as smaller groups such as the Kurdish movement, would find themselves with even fewer tools with which to influence Turkey’s political trajectory than before.
This marginalisation is only likely to increase the instability that the system seeks to dispel.
Is it likely to pass? The contest appears finely balanced. A rolling average of the recent polls conducted by election monitoring website James In Turkey shows the two campaigns neck-and-neck, with Yes on 50.6 per cent and No on 49.4 per cent.
The range of results is also very broad, with some pollsters giving the Yes campaign a 20-point lead, and others putting No ahead by a similar margin.
Another complicating factor is the atmosphere of intimation under which the vote is taking place, in which government rhetoric has branded No voters terrorist supporters and traitors to the nation.
Some observers believe that No voters are unwilling to disclose their preference to pollsters due to fear of possible government retribution.
Conversely, the government’s stranglehold on media and public campaigning, as well as its exploitation of the current state of emergency may be enough to push Yes across the line in the event of a close contest.
Campaigners for No have routinely been harassed by police and even arrested. One of the government’s emergency decrees abolished sanctions against media organisations producing biased coverage in the lead up to the election, to the obvious benefit of the government, which now indirectly controls the bulk of Turkey’s media.
Two issues that might animate voters against the government are the economy, which has been ailing for the past two years, and the large number of Syrian refugees in the country — a source of increasing frustration and resentment for many Turks.
Mr Erdogan has tried to frame the poll within his long-running and robustly successful narrative, in which he casts himself as the champion of the Turkish people against an array of internal and external enemies: the Gulenists, Kurdish separatist rebels, ISIL terrorists, and also the West — especially Turkey’s European neighbours, with whom he has cultivated rows in the lead-up to the vote.
Many Turks appear to hope that granting him more power will end the instability, terrorism, and atmosphere of crisis that have riven Turkey over the past four years.
In fact, a Yes vote is only likely to intensify the frustrations driving that instability, and entrench Mr Erdogan’s reliance on the tools of repression that increasingly characterise his rule.
foreign.desk@thenational.ae
