Governments with a strong mandate may tend to abuse power if there are no effective checks and balances mechanisms in place. Some argue that in Turkey the lack of a credible and strong parliamentary opposition inevitably puts the responsibility of checking and balancing AKP power on the civilian and military bureaucracy. There are also some who maintain that this should even be welcome.I partly agree and partly disagree with such views. Let me begin with the part I agree with. It is absolutely true that Turkey has lacked a strong and credible parliamentary opposition to the AKP. Thanks to the extremely unfair election system, which disqualifies parties with less than 10 percent of the vote to gain seats in Parliament, the elections of 2002 gave the AKP two-thirds of the seats in Parliament, with only about one-third of the national vote. This put the AKP government a position of power unprecedented in the history of Turkish democracy. In the period between 2002 and 2005, when the European Union preserved its credibility and when there was strong support for EU reforms among the public as well as the elite, the main opposition to the AKP government appeared to be the European Commission, which pointed to the shortcomings in its reform program and its implementation.
When the Sarkozy and Merkel factor came onto the scene in 2005 and the EU perspective lost its credibility to a great extent, popular support for the EU reforms declined sharply while an anti-EU backlash gained momentum. This led the military and civilian bureaucracy to assume the role of the main opposition to the AKP government, with the parliamentary opposition, the Republican People's Party (CHP), becoming merely a spokesman for it.
The elections of 2007 brought the AKP back to power, this time with a stronger mandate, with nearly half of the vote and nearly two-thirds of the seats in Parliament. The CHP was no longer the sole opposition party represented in Parliament, with both the hard-line nationalist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) gaining representation in the national assembly. Surveys and observations indicated, however, that at least part of the votes cast for the opposition parties were actually votes against the AKP rather than in favor of the alternative policies the opposition parties provided for. Thus the elections of 2007 also failed to provide an effective parliamentary opposition to the AKP.
My disagreements with observations concerning checks and balances problems in the Turkish political system maybe summarized around the following points: Governments with strong mandates who stay in power for longer periods may actually be a good thing for democracies, as evident from the experiences especially of Britain, Sweden, India and Japan. The AKP power has surely brought much-needed governmental and economic stability to Turkey that has helped the country to broaden freedoms, increase prosperity and enhance its world image.
In democracies, checks and balances on governments with strong mandates can be exercised only through constitutional and legal means. There can thus be no legitimacy accorded to military and non-constitutional judicial interventions in order to provide checks and balances on democratically elected governments.
A problem far more serious for Turkish democracy than the lack of strong and credible parliamentary opposition is the lack of commitment among politicians to the rules of the game. And the main reason for this is surely military and judicial interventions, which have turned the country into what has been called "a graveyard of political parties," severely hindering the institutionalization of political parties.
Partly due to political culture, but probably more so due to deficient institutionalization, Turkish political parties are controlled by leaders and/or cliques to a greater extent than may be the case in other democracies. Domination by leaders and cliques blocks renewal and the adoption of new ideas and solutions. Continuation of the military and civilian bureaucracy's political role leads political parties to try to use military and judicial intervention against their rivals.
