The warning reveals that those who oppose Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s presidency will make every effort to deny him this opportunity. If the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) does not heed this warning, it means opposing forces/actors will take the issue to the Constitutional Court. Given the fact that YÖK President Professor Erdoğan Tezic is a prominent constitutional law scholar, the warning by YÖK carries some weight.Why is academia, the military, the judiciary and the secular sections of the bureaucracy opposing Mr. Erdoğan’s presidency? After all he is the prime minister and in this post he is more powerful than the president. Well the answer is not as simple as the question.
The government and its share of power has always been looked upon as ephemeral and reserved for those transitory cadres that come and go with elections. Furthermore this (political) power is limited and strictly checked by institutions and laws made and supervised by the powerful bureaucracy, the judiciary included. In the Turkish context it is called “state power.” The state’s power is definitive and supersedes the political power that is utilized to run the day-to-day affairs of society.
Those that wield state power oversee how basic institutions function and make corrections when there are deviations from state policies that are shaped by written rules and unwritten directives. It is this tutelary function of the holders of state power that make them strong, unaccountable and privileged. The presidency is the epitome of everything associated with the state. A group that loses its grip on the presidency may lose its unchallenged position in the socio-political hierarchy, never to recover it. It is because of this concern that three actual and one threatened military coup have been put into effect since 1960.
Additionally there is a more-or-less clear definition of the qualities of the president of the republic: they have to be secular, statist, nationalist, modern and in harmony with the armed forces of the country. I would add “immune from corruption or any other questionable economic dealings,” but considering the rumors surrounding our recent string of presidents, this aspect has been subdued, although it has been revitalized with Mr. Erdoğan’s candidacy. The sum total of these qualities dovetails into the wholehearted reference to the president, “Your Excellency”.
Mr. Erdoğan is not the type to be called “Your Excellency” or “sayin,” by the standards of the Turkish state elite. They will simply deny bowing before him. Furthermore given the vagaries of the Turkish electoral system, only one third of the electorate has endorsed an AK Party majority in the Parliament and this partial popular shall be instrumental in electing the next president. Although the procedure is legal, there is a serious problem of representation and an ensuing problem of legitimacy that would haunt a president elected by the AK Party alone.
The Turkish state elite has distinguished itself from the other ruling elite of the non-western countries as being secular and compatible with western values. This quality has been labeled as “Kemalism,” identifying its doctrine as that of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Mr. Erdoğan does not come from the Kemalist tradition. Nor does he come from a tradition of either ideologically or socially defined secularism. Instead he has always identified himself with the Islamic tradition of Turkey, which has been at times antagonistic to both Kemalism and Western values. In this context his values are seen as shaped more by Middle Eastern Islamic groups than Europe. It is only after he ascended to power as prime minister that it seems he has come to grips with the realities of the world and the power structure in his country, and moderated his relatively sharp religious stance with a more democratic attitude. Yet this transformation has not convinced a large part of the electorate, and none of the state elite.
These circles believe that Mr. Erdoğan will revert back to his ideological roots, if and when he becomes the next president. In this capacity he is expected to endorse obscurantist laws and appoint religiously motivated personalities to critical official posts. It is no surprise that the YÖK declaration reads as follows: “The presidency is a post with many powers, but no accountability. The president is empowered to veto laws and influence autonomous institutions and superior judicial organs of the state [by selecting and appointing a part of their members]. Either the powers of the president must be reduced to fit the character of a parliamentary system, or these powers must be increased, and a semi-presidential system must be adopted whereby the president is elected by popular vote through a two-tier election system.”
That is the gist of the problem. No one must contend with the privileged position of the state elite, whose source of power is not popular choice, but nonetheless wields the power of the state machinery. It may be that this is an over-simplified statement, but I cannot come up with a better explanation.
As regards my personal opinion, Mr. Erdoğan has the legal right to be elected president, but he lacks the qualities of a sophisticated statesman and is ill-equipped to be a national leader of international stature. Yet given the foul play of those who are not accountable to the people, it could be that his election will do away with much of the undeserved privileges of the old guard, that use state power without accountability. But then this may also be a naïve expectation that will not come true for some time to come.
