Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan gives a speech during an event to close the electoral campaign in Sariyer, near Istanbul, Turkey, 15 April 2017. Michael Kappeler/Press Agency. All rights reserved.Citizens of Turkey are about to vote in a
referendum to decide whether to abandon the country’s parliamentary regime for
an exceptionally powerful executive
presidency. Constitutional amendments in question would grant the president
complete
power to rule with impunity over the executive and the budget, and a considerable
authority over the judiciary, while relegating the parliament to a shadow of
its former self with minimal power of scrutiny.
On paper, this is probably ‘the most
radical political change since the modern republic’s foundation in 1923’
and ‘the culmination of a steady drift towards authoritarianism
in Turkey which began a decade ago.
However, from a strictly practical perspective, it
is possible to argue that there is hardly any point in the coming Turkish
referendum to be held on April 16, 2017. Despite all the hype within the ‘yes’
and ‘no’ camps, both of which consider it as the most important vote ever to be
cast in the country’s history, one tends to miss that the referendum cannot
yield a major change in practical terms regardless of what the actual result
may be. The referendum cannot yield a major change
in practical terms regardless of what the actual result may be.
If ‘yes’ votes carry the day and the constitutional
amendments pass, the ‘new’ regime will be largely the same as the one that has
already been in practice since 28 August 2014, the day Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
took the oath of office and became the 12th President of Turkey. At least since
then, Erdoğan has been ruling de facto as the executive President, and
acting upon the capacities ‘new’ amendments propose to grant him with
completely impunity. Enjoying an absolute authority over the sheepishly loyal
AKP government he has personally handpicked, Erdoğan has already issued
executive decrees, dismissed and appointed ministers, managed the use of armed
forces both within and beyond the country’s borders, nullifying the elections,
dissolving the parliament, declaring a state of emergency, and ordering mass
institutional purges and arrests of MPs, mayors, journalists, academics,
businessmen and others.
In the contrary case where the amendments fail to
pass, there is no indication whatsoever that the current situation where
Erdoğan maintains a complete grip on power will not simply continue. The very
fact that the referendum is to be held under the current state of emergency
(going on for over 8 months and able to be extended indefinitely) is an obvious
sign that things are not expected to change much in the aftermath of the
referendum, even if the opposition votes somehow ‘win’.
Especially in the absence of any organized
opposition or institutional limitation to speak of under the ongoing state of
emergency where his word is practically law, it is therefore not immediately
clear to see why Erdoğan has insisted on holding a referendum. After all, at
best, it would retrospectively grant de jure cover to his de facto rule.
Is it even necessary to make all this look legitimate in a country where the
sovereign can and does rule in a manner that is completely unrestrained by
principles of rule of law and the separation of powers, and either violently
suppresses or renders subservient almost all entities that are designed to
check and balance his sovereign power?
In my opinion, the significance of this
particular referendum lies entirely in its symbolic and spacial dimensions, a
combination of which constitutes the reason why Erdoğan and the AKP government
have been pushing hard for it to take place. On the one hand, the April 16
referendum is a symbolic act because it constitutes an indispensable step to
granting democratic legitimacy to Erdoğan’s one-man rule. That is, of course,
insofar as democracy is crudely degraded to the unconstrained rule of a
numerical majority, usually ‘gained’ under highly questionable, unfair and
opaque circumstances of campaigning, voting and counting. Nonetheless, a
significant feature of the democratic hegemony of
the post-war era is that it is a symbolic one, obliging the ruling classes to
maintain the façade of democracy by displaying at least a nominal respect for
its formal procedures. Even when it is obvious that a given regime is a
dictatorship or a particular election an utter sham, one has to act as if it is
not in order to reproduce the democratic
system.
This, after all, is the why many patently
nondemocratic regimes feel obliged to call themselves democracies, such as the
‘Democratic’ Republics of Congo, North Korea, and Laos. It is also the reason
why regimes like Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, Nazarbayev’s Kazakhstan, Lukashenko’s
Belarus, and Aliyev’s Azerbaijan still go through the symbolic ritual of
‘democratic’ elections under conditions that all but negate the very point of
holding elections in the first place. Erdoğan’s regime, in this sense, needs
those credentials to maintain the democratic façade, without which its deeply
corrupt and increasingly
violent rule is simply naked, but in a twisted and reflexive sense.
Even though the current regime in Turkey would
probably continue undisturbed even after a ‘no’ result, those who have stood by
it cannot do so in the absence of the symbolic efficacy
provided by ‘popular sovereignty’ that enables them to disavow the brute facts
of the real. That is to say, without the seal of approval the April 16
referendum is supposed to provide, it is impossible to maintain the collective
lie and keep acting as if the political regime in Turkey carries even
minimal democratic legitimacy.
The April 16 referendum is also a spatial act that
serves to further polarize and consolidate the bipolar hegemony in Turkish
politics around the figure of Erdoğan himself, antagonistically dividing society
between the two homogenous camps of Erdoğanists and anti-Erdoğanists. Reducing
the plurality of positions within the political space to a bipolar division of ‘yes’
and ‘no’, it functions as a litmus test that compels all to disclose their ‘true
colors’ vis-à-vis the figure of Erdoğan.
This has already created an irreconcilable schism
within the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), the only significant competitor to
the AKP for the country’s overwhelmingly right-wing electorate. Accusing the
MHP leader and his clique of acting as Erdoğan’s fifth column, a sizable
group led by several MPs has rejected the official ‘yes’ stance of the
party and splintered off to campaign for a ‘no’ vote. A similar yet less
prominent line of division is discernable among the Kurdish
political movements as well. An Erdoğanist minority has been in formation
around the optimistic conviction that a decisive victory in the referendum
would give the President the necessary boost of power and confidence to restart
the peace negotiations with the Kurds. It is the
maintenance and reinforcement of this particular antagonism, the bipolar form
itself, which is of vital importance for the survival of Erdoğan’s and, by
extension, AKP’s hegemony in Turkish politics.
It is the maintenance and reinforcement of this
particular antagonism, the bipolar form itself, which is of vital importance
for the survival of Erdoğan’s and, by extension, AKP’s hegemony in Turkish
politics. In the absence of any other mobilizing factors that used to enable
the AKP government to consolidate and expand its support base (such as economic
policies generating prosperity and growth, welfare policies offering social
security, foreign policy success stories providing a sense of national pride
and common identity) this pure antagonism based on a cult of personality that depicts
every political conflict as a matter of life and death for the leader and ‘the
people’ he is supposed to embody is the only way for the AKP to remain in
power. Thus, the April 16 referendum is an act of desperation on AKP’s part,
which uses perhaps the only gun left in its war chest: Erdoğan.
In this sense, the referendum is also the ultimate
expression of Erdoğan’s political narcissism, indicating that he is willing to
risk it all just to maintain his position in the spotlight and remain the locus
of the Turkish body politic. In the midst of all that chaos, violence and
noise, the April 16 referendum is ultimately a very expensive and reckless way
of forcing every single citizen in Turkey to answer an essentially personal
and, in fact, trivial question: Don’t you like Erdoğan? After fifteen years in
power alone, it is rather tragic to witness the crumbling of a once mighty
self-confidence into a sad question that begs for an affirmation of self-worth
in the eyes of others.