On Sunday 24 June, I will be glued to my TV screen to watch two historical events. The first, and by far the most important, is England’s match against Panama for the group stage of the 2018 World Cup. The second, and perhaps the reason why you are reading this post, is the results of the parliamentary and presidential elections in Turkey.
I have been commissioned to write a commentary for a leading newspaper and scheduled to make a TV news appearance to analyse the election results, so much of my thoughts will be expressed soon enough. However, I was recently asked by a journalism student whether I consider Turkey a democracy. My answer was negative. On paper Turkey may look like a democracy, but in practice it is far from it. Every democratic system, whether parliamentary or presidential, contains a flaw or two whether they be the voting system, the constitutional boundaries or the role of institutions or executive branches. However, Turkey’s system (before and especially after the constitutional changes of 2017), is an amalgam of the various deficiencies that can be found in different democratic systems. The end result is a structure that resembles a democracy, but isn’t one and just doesn’t make the grade. Checks and balances? Eroded. Fundamental freedoms? Violated. Freedom of expression? Curtailed. Tyranny of the majority? Institutionalised. Civil society? embattled. Even the electoral process is unfair, and, at times, unfree. The elections are taking place under a state of emergency. This is the second election to be held under such restrictive conditions which have been in place for almost two years. How can Turkey be called a democracy when last year’s referendum to fundamentally transform the political system in order to entrench the rule and power of the incumbent president take place under a state of emergency? How can it be a democracy when the leaders of the third largest political party are arrested and imprisoned while still on trial without remand, in what is clearly politically motivated charges? Ahead of Sunday’s polls, the liberal and Kurdish oriented People’s Democratic Party (HDP) is experiencing real difficulties to campaign through violence and intimidation. Meanwhile, The HDP’s Presidential candidate, selahattin demirtas, is behind bars under trumped up charges of terrorism. In Turkey, the resources of the state are intermeshed with that of the ruling party and are used for campaign purposes. After years of co-option and censorship, the media is overwhelming sympathetic to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the AKP. Some have counted that around 90 per cent of media outlets are now pro-government. Meanwhile the state broadcaster, TRT, has devoted, by some counts, almost ten times more coverage to President Erdogan than to his challengers. Go to any Turkish city and you will see at least three gigantic AKP and Erdogan posters located in key arteries of the population centre for every backstreet opposition billboard. Turkey’s 10 per cent parliamentary threshold is a stain on its so-called democracy. This restriction was deliberately designed to prevent Kurdish political party representation. Indeed, if the HDP wins less than 10 per cent of the popular vote, the ruling AKP will be the winner of around 80 seats, all but guaranteeing their parliamentary majority. No wonder the HDP is constantly bullied and intimidated. The OSCE which monitors elections in Turkey releases an interim report during the election process and another after the voting is complete. Over the years each report has been more damning than the next, but yet its criticisms and recommendations go unheeded. Turkey’s election board has been filled with government allies and the safety of ballots is in severe doubt in some parts of the country, mostly in areas where the aforementioned 10 per cent threshold becomes critical. To make matters worse, ballots without an official seal will be considered valid and safeguards against fraud are not strong enough. Many doubt the elections will be free and fair. And if enough of the population doesn’t believe that the process is transparent, then there is a serious problem. The opposition has to be congratulated for competing in such an environment, let alone giving President Erdogan and the AKP a run for their money. Some commentators have gone so far as to raise the prospect of a governmental defeat. This is unlikely. Erdogan will probably win the presidency in either the first or second round. It would be a bonus for President Erdogan to have an AKP majority in parliament, but not essential. The new constitution was conceived to give the President enough authority to get things done without parliament causing too much trouble. And what it can do – refuse to authorise the budget and reject presidential decrees, Erdogan will overcome through backroom deals and manoeuvres with a handful of key parliamentary deputies whose support will be required to swing a vote. Still, the opposition parties and candidates have done well in the circumstances, especially in a system designed to keep them in opposition.
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With upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections, one would think that Turkey is awash with excitement and fervour. But the election season has been a rather subdued affair. Turks seem to be suffering from election fatigue. Let’s not forget that this is the sixth big vote in Turkey in just four years. The campaign period also coincides with the holy month of Ramazan – Erdogan apparently ordered electioneering to be somewhat calmer. Hmmm. Let’s not forget just how high the stakes are. If incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wins the presidential race, with the new constitution in place it would mean he will be an elected autocrat with unprecedented power. And if his Justice and Development Party (AKP) gain a majority in parliament, Erdogan will be able to use his powers to their maximum potential. Indeed, this is an election that is worth campaigning for, regardless of which party you sympathise with. Although there is now a little bit of a buzz after the holiday period and ahead of polling day, compared to previous elections, it still remains the pretty calm affair. The candidate and party which seems to be suffering from the most amount of election fatigue is that President Erdogan and his AKP. No doubt, they will almost certainly win, but the AKP needs to fight in order to get 50 per cent of the vote so that it may dominate parliament to rubber stamp the will of the President. Meanwhile, Erdogan will win the presidency but would prefer to do it in the first round rather than in a second round two weeks later. Yet, Erdogan is looking tired and his campaign lacklustre. Some of his rallies have been visibly empty and his tongue lashings against opponents and the international conspiracies against Turkey is less venomous than previous years. The billboard campaign of both Erdogan and the AKP appear duller by the day. Apparently, CHP Presidential candidate Muharrem Ince scored higher ratings than Erdogan not only on television, but also on the internet. No doubt because Erdogan and what he stands for is clear, the other candidates who lack media exposure are, therefore, more interesting especially when they mock Erdogan’s lack of university degree and his use of teleprompter which has been hit by system failure. This leads to the question, is Erdogan’s popularity waning. Has the man who has dominated Turkish politics for the last 15 years, lost his shine? Many have described Recep Tayyip Erdogan as a charismatic leader so it is worth consulting Max Weber, one of the three founding fathers of modern sociology, about this matter. In looking at the world around him in turn of the last century, Weber characterised the nature of societal order and political authority. In other words, why do people obey? Why do we abide by laws rather than rebel or resist? Often this comes down to the question of power – people with more power control us. But the use or threat of force cannot be used all the time. More often than not, people obey political elites because they respect authority, meaning that they recognise that those in power have legitimacy to rule. Weber was interested in different types of authority in political societies and identified three. The first is rational-legal authority, which in basic terms means the presence of rules, laws, institutions and bureaucracies that govern based on consensus, not unlike modern democracies. Secondly, there is traditional authority which is when leaders base their legitimacy on past traditions of patrimony, often this would take the form of a monarchy. Finally, and here comes the interesting bit, Weber identified the phenomenon of Charismatic authority. The term “charisma” is religious in origin, Greek for “divine gift”. Put another way, an individual with a god-like quality or aura. That’s the origin of the word, but Charisma is also a word we use colloquially. We know what it means, but it’s hard to define. We use it to describe celebrities, board room managers, politicians and popular people. For example, George Clooney, Steve Jobs, Martin Luther King, Fidel Castro, Nelson Mandela, Adolf Hitler, Will Smith and Barack Obama have all been described as charismatic. A few things I am sure you have noted from the above list. One, all of the aforementioned are men. Two, it lumps together the good with the evil, the profound with the superficial. Thirdly, charisma is in the eye of the beholder. For example, Obama may be charismatic for me, but not to you. Ditto Steve Jobs and Adolph Hitler. Nevertheless, with all the problems associated with the term charisma, Weber still noted the preponderance of charismatic leaders in some countries. They often emerge in a society which has experienced turmoil or an existential crisis. In this context, an individual appears, perhaps from the ranks of the military or a religious group who has exceptional organisational and oratory skills and manages to unite a society and head them towards a particular direction or vision. This is the basis for his (rarely her) authority. That’s right, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk is an almost ideal example. But in some respects so is Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He emerged at a time when Turkey was experiencing one of its worst economic crises in its history, there was uncertainty about the future direction of Turkey, and from the perspective of the pious and conservative population, a sense of victimhood. In this context Erdogan rose to the fore offering Turkey, or at least the demographic of Turkish society he represented as well as disenchanted liberals and capitalists, a vision of a “New Turkey”, one in which a pious generation would arise. This new Turkey would be economically prosperous, technologically and infrastructural advanced and a world leader. Women could wear headscarves to university and the organs of the state would represent and work for the real Turkish majority, those from the socially conservative Anatolian heartland and the urban poor while also benefitting the economic elite. But that was then and the excitement of the Erdogan years of the past 10-15 years is waning. Weber predicted this would be the case in societies where charismatic authority is the source of legitimacy. Charismatic appeal is only temporary. Indeed, the rhetoric of Erdogan has been heard before. The vision is clear as is the direction. It is no longer novel and what is real can be mundane. Mega projects? The third bridge is open and so is the Marmaray. Despite all the hype, they turned out to be pretty lacklustre (some would say failures). Kanal Istanbul and the third airport now seem less exciting. Yes, Erdogan may get his new powers and promise a stronger Turkey, but what he will do is already known. Simply put, more of the same. Weber argues that at this stage, a process begins which he called the routinization of charisma. This is when charismatic authority shifts to either traditional or legal-rational authority, a result of the need to maintain power and is often facilitated by the group around the charismatic leader. Sometimes this is achieved by building monuments and creating new rituals. To some extent we have seen this routinisation process begin with the narrative and commemoration of the “martyrs” of the attempt coup of 16 July 2016. Regardless, what is clear is that although Erdogan and the AKP will no doubt win the forthcoming elections, we are entering a period of the routinization of Erdogan’s charisma, the process of which will dominate the work of Erdogan and the AKP and be institutionalised through the new powers of the constitution. Not much to get excited about, even if you support him. There are many embattled democracies in the world today, but How Democracy Die is primarily a book about America. It is a warning to Americans to never be complacent about their democracy, regardless of how robust and dynamic the oldest democratic constitution in the world may appear to be; the foundations of even the strongest of constitutions shake when an autocratic demagogue is committed to smashing the liberal democratic order. In this book, Harvard professors Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky examine international examples to illustrate how autocrats use legal means to kill democracy. Professor Ziblatt is a historian of Europe from the nineteenth century to the present day and Professor Levitsky focuses on Latin America and the developing world. You can’t get more qualified than that to write a book about how democracies die. With the exception of its snowy neighbour to the north and its transatlantic Anglo sidekick, many who live outside of the US reside in countries where democracy has either died and been reborn, or is experiencing a difficult process of democratization. Others are witnessing the death of their own democracy in front of their very eyes. It is therefore imperative that Americans, regardless of their level of education, political views or social status, pay heed to the political histories of other nations in order to prevent the misfortune of others to be repeated in America. This is especially true while Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office. Sure, he was elected fair and square, but there are facets of his character and policies that raise alarm bells. Borrowing and updating the work of Juan Linz, Ziblatt and Levitsky highlight four key indicators of authoritarianism. They are 1) rejection or weak commitment to the democratic rules of the game, 2) denial of the legitimacy of political opponents, 3) toleration of encouragement of violence, 4) readiness to curtail civil liberties of opponents including the media. Note that Trump falls into each of these four categories. In recent times the death of a democracy is less likely to occur through a military coup or by a violent revolution. It’s not that there aren’t any good old-fashioned military coups anymore (Thailand, Ecuador), but it is increasingly the case that demagogues obtain power through the ballot box, and once there slowly but surely push democratic norms to the point of collapse in a bid to solidify power. Often this achieved by eroding the checks and balances needed in a healthy democracy through the combination of nullifying the legislative power of parliament, filling the judiciary with sycophantic or co-opted judges, attacking the critical media and delegitimising political opponents. Such has happened in Venezuela, Turkey, Peru, Argentina, Russia, and Hungary to name but a few. Then there is, of course, the examples of Germany and Italy earlier in the century. In the case of the United States, Ziblatt and Levitsky argue that over time America’s democratic fail safes have been eroded including party gatekeeping, institutional forbearance, self-restraint and mutual toleration. This has led to the situation of today. A US president who has no qualms about railing against the free press and calling for his political opponent to be locked up. It is often said that history is doomed to repeat itself. Perhaps that’s true for those who choose to ignore the past. This is why a book like this is so important. Americans can no longer afford to be complacent. The debate surrounding the decision of US Present Donald J. Trump’s to nix the Iran nuclear deal, otherwise known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), has been a real eye opener. It seems that some politicians and commentators have lost their moral compasses.
After Trump’s decision, Federica Mogherini, the foreign minister of the EU, stated that “We are determined to keep this deal in place”. Meanwhile, it was reported that Bruno Le Maire, France’s finance minister, commented that the Iran deal highlights the need to defend European economic sovereignty, even putting forward the idea of creating a statute to offset US sanctions on European firms doing business in Iran. Meanwhile, The Guardian’s Simon Tisdall, contends that Britain should join other European nations to impose diplomatic and economic sanctions on the US – make Trump pay for sabotaging the Iran deal, he argues. Wow, that must have been some great deal to advocate that Europe side not with the US, but an autocratic regime which hates the very ideals that Europe stands for (remember when Italy was obliged to cover naked statues so not to offend the visiting so-called moderate Iranian President Hassan Rouhani), an Islamic theocracy that has terrifying resemblances to the dystopian society envisaged in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. First things first, the deal itself was poor. Bret Stephens of the New York Times put it best when he wrote that if the JCPOA was so great then why did leaders from France, Germany and the UK, as well as some of its other supporters, feel the need to accept that it needed fixing? Fix it, not nix it, they begged of Trump. Surely, if it was such a good deal, it wouldn’t need any fixing? In reality, there was much that needed to be mended, so much so that the repair work would have left the deal unrecognizable. Where to start, the sunset clause allowing the Islamic Republic to be a nuclear weapon threshold state within 13 years? And then there’s the fact that the deal ignores Tehran’s ballistic missile programme, the exclusion of which was a grave error because if Iran were to acquire a nuclear weapon, it would have to be compatible with its ballistic projectiles. And what about the inspections themselves? Far from unfettered access on demand, if the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) want access to secret military areas, they can’t just barge it. They would need approval from a committee of which Iran is a member! Moreover, the Israeli seizure of Iranian nuclear documents confirmed the suspicions of the US and the IAEA that Iran had indeed been working on a nuclear weapons programme, which although frozen, was still not disclosed to the IAEA and therefore contrary to the spirit of the JCPOA and perhaps even the letter of the Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT). It was under President Obama that the JCPOA was signed. Obama twice failed the people of Iran, proud inheritors of an ancient civilization whose erudition and study of their poets such as Saadi and Hafez makes me wish that people in the West would do the same for Shakespeare, Melville, and Cervantes. The first Obama let down was in 2009. As Iranians took to the streets to demand that their votes count in what become known as the Green Movement, Obama’s silence was deafening. Later, Obama did well to spearhead international sanctions which crippled the Iranian economy. Make no mistake, in 2013 the sanctions brought the Mullahs to their knees. However, Obama and the P5 +1 abandoned the prospect of regime change in order to make this terrible nuclear deal. Not only did this hand a lifeline to the Supreme Leader and the Revolutionary Guards (the real powers in Iran), but it allowed the regime to continue its support with boots on the ground for Bashar al-Assad, the butcher of Damascus, who deliberately tortures, murders and massacres his own people, sometimes with the additional sadistic twist of chemical nerve agents. Europe needs to be more honest about its Iran policy. The reality is there are billions of euros at stake with companies such as Airbus, Total, British-Dutch Shell, Peugeot, Renault, and Siemens standing to lose out with the nixing of the Iran deal. It just all goes to show that the lofty foreign policy ideals of the EU are nothing more than a bunch of words. To hell with the Iranian people, many critics of the deal are effectively saying, as long as European companies make a profit. Shame. |
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