Mustafa Akyol is a columnist for Al-Monitor's Turkey Pulse, a columnist for the Turkish Hurriyet Daily News, and a monthly contributing opinion writer for The International New York Times. His articles have also appeared in Foreign Affairs, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian. He is the author of Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty
The hottest political topic in Turkey these days is the major constitutional amendment the government is cooking up to introduce a “presidential system.” This, in fact, has been the grand ambition of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the past few years. But only now, thanks to the political alliance they formed with the Nationalist Action Party (MHP), they can find enough mandates in the parliament — more than 330 seats out of 550 — to realize this major transition.
If this transition takes place, Turkey would be abandoning the European-style “parliamentary system” it has been adhering to since the beginning of the republic in 1923 — or even from the first Ottoman Constitution of 1876. In this system, the president is a nonpartisan head of state, whereas the real executive power lies in the hands of the prime minister. Erdogan had no problem with this design throughout his first decade in power when he himself was the prime minister. Once he decided to run for the presidency in 2012, however, he and his advisers began advocating the “presidential system” and a new constitution that would allow that.
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