On August 17th, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu announced that efforts to form a coalition government had failed and he was returning the mandate to do so to President Erdogan. This came as a surprise to just about no one, since President Erdogan clearly wants to redo the June 7th elections that denied him the majority needed to create an executive presidency. The deadline to form a government is August 23rd, after which Mr. Erdogan can call for new elections in November.
In British-style parliamentary systems like Turkey’s, however, if the party with the largest number of seats fails to form a government, the right to try and form a government must then be given to the next largest party. That means Mr. Erdogan should now offer a mandate to Kemal Kilicdaroglu and his Republican People’s Party (CHP), even if the CHP’s chances of forming a government by August 23rd appear extremely slim.
It seems that the would-be Sultan has no intention of doing so, however. Kemal Kilicdaroglu, along with National Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahceli and People’s Democracy Party (HDP) co-leader Selahattin Demirtas, has steadfastly refused to negotiate the formation of a new government with anyone other than Prime Minister Davutoglu and the other party leaders. The President of a parliamentary republic like Turkey is supposed to remain above party politics and serve as the largely ceremonial head of state, so Kilicdaroglu, Bahceli and Demirtas’ stances on the issue are completely reasonable – to everyone except Mr. Erdogan, of course.
This week President Erdogan therefore announced that “We have no time to lose with those who do not know the address of Beştepe” (the 1000+ room palace that Mr. Kilicdaroglu claims was built illegally and which he refuses to set foot in). This was the “royal ‘we’”, of course, followed by an insistence on new elections immediately, despite the CHP’s insistence that they are “willing to form a government” and are “waiting to be given the mandate”.
To make it all perfectly clear to the more thick-witted amongst us, however, Mr. Erdogan explained the current situation in Turkey: “There is a president with de facto power in the country, not a symbolic one. The president should conduct his duties for the nation directly, but within his authority. Whether one accepts it or not, Turkey’s administrative system has changed. Now, what should be done is to update this de facto situation in the legal framework of the constitution,” In other words, Mr. Erdogan is already the executive president who decides everything – if “de facto authority” sounds an awful lot like “illegal power grab,” that’s just a misunderstanding... In the mind of Mr. Erdogan, the people elected him last year and therefore the rest is just semantics – never mind the June 7 electoral results, or the fact that the people elected Mr. Erdogan to a largely ceremonial position rather than to the office of “Sultan-in-Chief.” The HDP’s Mr. Demirtas suggested that a referendum be held asking the people whether or not they want such an executive president, but the de facto sultan has expressed no interest in a referendum he would likely lose.
President Erdogan may also have good reason not to give the CHP and the other two parties even the slimmest chance, with only a few days to go before August 23rd, to form a government. Despite their grave differences, it is not totally inconceivable that the CHP might form a government with either the MHP or the HDP, while the other party supports the new government from outside. If they did so, the government might not last long but it could well last long enough to pursue the issues that unite all three opposition parties in Turkey: reopening corruption investigations against senior government ministers and officials, opening additional inquiries into malfeasance by the previous AKP government, shedding light on the arms shipments the previous government made to jihadis in Syria, decommissioning the gargantuan new presidential palace, rolling back some of the recent legislation the AKP passed for itself, and limiting Mr. Erdogan’s power.
If in the process of pursuing the goals that unite them the opposition parties could also agree to a ceasefire between the military and the PKK, Turkey might start to look much better without Mr. Erdogan’s executive influence than with it. At that point, the road to pursuing Mr. Erdogan himself might open up.
David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He is the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and author of The Kurdish Nationalist Movement (2006, Cambridge University Press) and co-editor (with Mehmet Gurses) of Conflict, Democratization and the Kurds in the Middle East (2014, Palgrave Macmillan).
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
