We’re used to seeing legal procedures in presidential or semi-presidential systems over electoral fraud allegations. In the parliamentary systems the rules are pre-determined and the participants respect them. All objections to the presidential candidates are expressed before the election. When you are used to Western democracies’ standards, it’s easy to think that all the discussions over the Turkish presidential elections are about the personality of Abdullah Gül. Because it’s impossible to understand why the constitutional rules about the presidential elections are not clear enough, how people can come and go from the national assembly hall, why the speaker doesn’t want to proceed with a roll call and why perceptions and opinions are more important than the laws themselves.They may even think that Turks are incapable of electing a president. They may also ask why presidential elections are that important. With this constitution, written after a military coup, it’s quite difficult to determine Turkey’s form of government of Turkey. The constitution hasn’t got a democratization perspective; this represents a paradox for those who hold street protests in order to defend the actual regime. The latter is qualified a parliamentary system, but the president’s prerogatives are as important as in the semi-presidential system’s. It’s not a semi-presidential system, because the president is elected by Parliament and not directly by the citizens. The establishment of the Parliament is also unusual, as one third of the vote can assure two thirds of the seats. A majority can constitute a government and therefore designate a president. The mechanism we call the political system in Turkey is just that bizarre. As a result a political party that has obtained one third of the vote in the general elections and holds two thirds of the seats tries to designate a president by itself and this creates a real political storm. How could a foreigner understand all this?
If the legal framework and the rules are in place, why would a presidential election degenerate so? The reason is hidden between the lines of the rules written by the military coup. The system never thought that one day a political party could accede to power with a diverging rhetoric. It thought the mechanism of authoritarian institutionalism would always be predominant. However the transformations in the world and in Turkey have helped atypical political actors obtain political power. Now those who say, “We didn’t mean that to happen” do everything imaginable to alter the current situation. But they create three big problems: First of all they pull the military into daily political life, secondly they transfer the center of political life from the national assembly to the streets, and thirdly they reduce all the problems to secularism.
All this can be explained in a very simple way. The Turkish political regime is not that democratic in substance, but there is a so-called democracy in place. In order to understand what is happening right now, you should think about the difference between the rule of the laws and the rule-of-law; about the fact that some people prefer to frighten others in order to make “politics”; about the actual electoral system and the political party system. Then it would be easier to see that all this has nothing to do with either a particular political party or a particular candidate.
