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With all eyes on the U.S. as it inaugurates a new leader, Turkey is preparing to amend its constitution to make its president even more powerful than the American executive.

Theres nothing inherently wrong with replacing parliamentary government with a presidential system. The problem is timing and context: Turkeys proposed changes, which will go to a national referendum after being approved by parliament, follow the unsuccessful coup against increasingly autocratic President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

QuickTake Turkey's Divide

In practice, a revised constitution would make it much easier for Erdogan to consolidate power entirely, taking Turkey out of the democratic column and making it into a dictatorship, pure and simple.

The proposed constitutional revision has lots of moving parts. But the most important is to transform Turkeys modified parliamentary system into a presidential one. The presidents powers now are, in principle, much more limited. He governs alongside a prime minister chosen by the parliamentary majority, who in turn appoints a cabinet thats responsible to parliament. An important practical and symbolic mechanism of parliamentary oversight of the government is the right of parliament to demand that cabinet ministers appear before it to answer inquiries -- a right known as interpellation.

The new draft would shift the basic structure of the system by abolishing the office of prime minister and giving the president the authority to appoint the members of the cabinet. As part of this change, the parliaments right to interpellate cabinet ministers would be removed.

Americans would find that aspect of the change unremarkable. The U.S. president appoints his own cabinet, albeit with the advice and consent of the Senate. Cabinet secretaries appear before Congress by courtesy, not by an inherent congressional right to question them.

But the proposed Turkish Constitution goes further still in allowing the president to be the head of a political party. That means the president could exercise direct control over what candidates his party runs for office. Erdogan could handpick parliamentarians from his own party, who would be extremely unlikely to exercise a check over him, because he could also kick them out of the party.

In practice, of course, the U.S. president is also the head of the party to which he belongs. But in the U.S. system, that doesnt give him the authority to pick congressional candidates. That power lies with primary voters, donors and party leaders.

Under the changed system, Turkish presidential elections would take place at the same time as parliamentary elections, every five years. That would make it difficult for voters to express dissension at the national level during the presidents term, because there would be no midterm elections.

A further proposed change sought by Erdogans AK Party is to give the president power over the High Council of Judges and Prosecutors. Erdogan has already effectively taken control by purging that body in the aftermath of the coup. The proposed amendments would make that control permanent.

In the U.S. presidential system, of course, the executive appoints federal judges and senior federal prosecutors. As long as they subsequently serve their terms on good behavior, they can function relatively independently. The trouble is that, as Erdogans purge shows, theres no similar long-term guarantee of de facto independence in the Turkish system. Erdogans judges and prosecutors would be seen as political functionaries, and might well actually be subordinate to the executive. A proposed nominal guarantee of judicial and prosecutorial impartiality is only as good as political reality makes it.

Perhaps the most clever and pernicious element of the proposed change is that it limits the president to two terms -- but only starting with ratification and new elections. That would allow Erdogan to remain in power until 2029, when hell be 75. By then he would have been running Turkey as prime minister or president for a whopping 26 years. Thats not a recipe for democracy, to put it mildly.

The entire reform package must pass the parliament with 330 votes out of 550. The ruling AK Party doesnt have enough votes on its own, but it can reach the threshold by getting the votes of the nationalist, far-right MH Party. Then the package would go to a referendum.

In 2010, Turkish voters approved constitutional reforms pushed by the AK Party, by 58 percent to 42 percent. The vote is unlikely to be so lopsided this time. In practice, the vote will be a referendum on Erdogan himself.

Absent the failed coup, it seems conceivable that Erdogan could have lost a bid to make Turkey into a presidential system designed to maximize his power. But the coup unfortunately provides ammunition for the argument that he needs greater authority to run the country.

If the presidential change prevails in Turkey, and is used to subvert democracy still further, it will contribute to the perception in many places that the presidential form of government is simply a prelude to autocracy. Traditionally, the U.S. system has stood as a bulwark against those arguments. Whether it remains so is the most significant question of Donald Trumps presidency that has just begun.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story: Noah Feldman at nfeldman7@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Stacey Shick at sshick@bloomberg.net

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Turkey's New Constitution Would End Its Democracy - Bloomberg

From left to right: Edelman, Lane, Rodgers, and Schappele are seated at a University Center for Human Valuespanel to discuss democracy and global liberalism.

By Ruby Shao

Democracy around the world is being distorted by external forces and corroded from within by officials who fail to conform to its processes and values, according to politics professor and University Center for Human Values director Melissa Lane, who presented the argument at a panel on Friday, Jan. 20.

The challenges we face, from nativism, to the role of money, and ethics and public policy, and the fate of democratic rhetorics and the state of our public sphere, are now being played out literally as we speak, moderator and history professor Jeremy Adelman explained.

He emphasized some downsides of globalization in the form of civic discord, rising inequality, the rise of populism, and slow and exclusive economic growth, as manifested in events like Brexit, the United States presidential election, and the destruction of Aleppo.

Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of sociology and international affairs in the Wilson School and the University Center for Human Values, noted that the number of electoral liberal democracies in good standing peaked about ten years ago, and has been declining since then. In this case, liberalism is a political doctrine that requires the government to protect the liberty of the individual.

She cited political sociologist Larry Diamond's finding that, from 2000 through 2015, liberal democracies collapsed in 27 countries. Liberal values have declined in far more countries than they have improved in during the past decade, according to Freedom House, Scheppele added.

Opponents of liberalism decry it using three main tropes, Lane said. Undecidability refers to the charge that scientific evidence never decides the fundamental questions, so that ordinary people can reject expert opinions. Indecision depicts liberals as too cowardly to act. Impotence accuses liberals of lacking the ability to fix today's problems.

Liberalism is threatening to devour its own parents while potentially being devoured by its own children, Lane added.

She explained that bureaucracy, which served as the scaffolding with which liberals extended rights and liberties to more and more groups, is buckling under disrespect for expertise, conventions, and institutions. Meanwhile, liberalism has helped produce the environmental crisis, largely by failing to regulate businesses enough. She called for remedying both these issues as steps toward preserving liberalism.

Focusing on the American case, history professor emeritus Dan Rodgers noted that recent months marked the most unpredictable start to the beginning of a presidency since at least the 18th century, when some wondered whether George Washington might try to revive a democratic monarchy. Nobody knows whether Trump will usher in an era of effective negotiations, quasi-organized chaos, or scandal, he said.

Rather than optimistically believing the United States Constitution will withstand contemporary pressures, Americans should consider all the constitutions across the globe that have fallen victim to leaders she calls constitutional autocrats, Scheppele warned.

Constitutional autocrats win elections, Scheppele said. But upon taking office, they undercut liberalism. First, they attack the constitution to remove checks on executive power, under the guise of increasing efficiency. They then try to control key institutions. These include the judiciary, because it can label their actions unconstitutional or illegal, and the media, because it can publish alternatives to the narratives created by the autocrats. They also discredit the non-governmental organization sector, which covers human rights and transparency groups, as partisan or elitist and therefore untrustworthy.

Next, the constitutional autocrats insert loyalists into the prosecutor's office, tax authority, police and security services. They delegitimize the political opposition as outdated, corrupt, or otherwise unworthy of attention. Rewriting the election laws skews the following election in their favor. They bypass middlemen by moving to direct democracy; hence the proliferation of referenda as well as social media rather than traditional news outlets to communicate with the public. Conventions that have bound all their predecessors, like the rules of fair play and civility, stop applying to them.

Finally, constitutional autocrats attack the constitution by arguing that it should be replaced, or that it must be rescued from enemy hands, Scheppele said. The goal of the game becomes to change the game's rules, a development that makes the system unsustainable.

Lane suggested the trend was starting to affect the United States.

Not releasing taxes, not appointing to the Supreme Court, not even holding a hearing to appoint to the Supreme Court, not requiring the nominees for the Cabinet positions to all complete the ethics checks before being confirmed these are actually really fundamental norms that have already just fallen by the wayside, and once they're gone, it's very difficult to get them back, she said.

Scheppele noted that checks and balances in the Constitution depend on every institution defending its institutional prerogatives against those of other institutions. For that reason, she worried about the unprecedented alignment of all American institutions in a single direction at a critical moment. The Republicans control the presidency and both houses of Congress, and will probably dominate the Supreme Court. Most crucially, they direct 33 out of 50 state governments. Wielding more power than any party has had since the 1930s, the Republicans are introducing one-party rule, she said.

However, Rodgers countered that the divisions within the party may well produce effective checks and balances, as the party represents small government whereas Trump embodies autocracy. Characterizing liberalism as a movement of the national and international, Rodgers called for it to survive by returning to the local, the arena occupied by dissatisfied Americans. Local and state politics will continue to hold the most importance for people's daily lives, he added, giving examples like property taxation, school policies, police procedures, criminal justice, and gun control.

It's also where democratic deliberation is more possible, where one can find oneself to some extent insulated from the highly polarized media system in which we live, in which the powers of organized money don't intrude quite so heavily. It's where people might actually listen to each other, pay attention to each other, do what we think of in democracy as the act of participation in politics, deliberative reasoning. It's where some of the anger that's turned this election upside down might be redirected in more constructive ways, Rodgers said.

Titled Global Liberalism in Crisis? the roundtable discussion was sponsored by the Department of History, the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, the Department of Politics, and the University Center for Human Values. It took place at 12:00 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 20, in Robertson Bowl 16.

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Panel discusses how external forces distort democracy - The Daily Princetonian

Democracy, for many, is dead or just about to be. The outgoing US president has reflected on the fragility of this fabric to hold the weight of the mass. No doubt, democracy was one of the best ideas of the 20th century which took it for granted that people will speak their minds and shape their future. But it turned out quite on the contrary not only in the postcolonial democracies but also in developed ones as well. As a public enterprise model of politics, 120 countries and 63 per cent of the world population is currently living under the democratic shield. If the 20th century could hold the democratic fabric intact, the 21st century witnesses its setbacks as nominal establishments with autocratic and kleptocratic elements largely ruining the institutions and systems.

The founders of modern democracy (say like John Stuart Mill and James Madison) regarded it as a powerful, but imperfect tool for governance. The imperfect element proved powerful for its way forward in many of the under-developed, newly independent and post colonial nations. Michel Kalecki used the term intermediate regimes to the governing establishments in these countries, where the lower middle class and the rich peasantry were identified to perform the role of the ruling class.

Accordingly, whenever social upheavals brought the representatives of the lower middle class to power, they invariably served the interests of the big business often aligned with the remnants of the feudal system. By virtue of their numerical size, the lower middle class (in a democratic frame of elections) succeeded in coming to power. The state under these regimes was expected to play the role of dynamic enterprises and undertake investments to maintain and improve economic growth and ensure development and distribution. They tried to deliver to the interests of the lower middle class (stake holders) with state capitalism as a special purpose vehicle.

Kaleckian theory found that to fulfil these requirements, the ruling regimes had to gain a measure of independence from the foreign capital and carry out land reforms to ensure social equity and establish upward growth of the economy. The regimes however, faced severe resistance from the imperial capitalists and the feudal landlords to achieve these essential and enabling requisites. This recognised them of the imperative to compromise with the upper middle class and international capital. The compromise levels reached the extent of reckoning them as forces capable of threatening the existence of the regime itself. To remain in power, obviously the regimes had to identify other routeskleptocratic and collaborative. Incompatible partners in this route added to the imperfection of governing tool.

The relevance of this pattern in the Indian context has been debated in the 70s. In 1973, K N Raj by relating the sequence of political events and administrative patterns, established its relevance. However, it was rejected by E M S Nampoothirppad through a different logic: Comparing the nature of power transmission from the imperialistic hands to their local loyalists. He argued further that the very description of the alignment of class forces makes it clear that the concept does not apply to India. This gave birth to new appreciative theoretical debates. One inference from these debates is: If the power is acquired by the recipient regime in a dominating position, then the political power can be consolidated systematically in collaboration with the interest groups.

It is not meant here to argue that democracy has deteriorated only in the post-colonial countries. Rather, there is an aversion to this governance tool across the spectrum by virtue of the imperfection it inherited en-route. This prompted to pin point the elements that were (probably) instrumental in deteriorating the democracy. The two prominent causes identified in this context are the financial crisis (recession of 2007-08) and (2) the rise of China as a global power. The Chinese communist party is said to have broken the democratic worlds claim of establishing economic well being. For instance, if the US was doubling living standards every 30 years, China could do it in 10 years (The Economist, 2014)

Further, the democracies in the global space have reoriented its approach and outlook. It has become a rewarding operation for the loyalists making the democratic political establishments become self-serving. Platos worry about democracy turned out for rightcitizens would live from day to day, indulging in the pleasure of the moment. Democratic governments got into the habit of borrowing to meet the short term needs of the people while evading the long run investments required for improving living standards. For sure, they are uncertain of their long term power position. This got into a vicious cycle and resulted in the decline of visible political loyalists, thus increasing occurrences of concentration of power and wealth with few.

It is interesting to note that the share of political party memberships are on the decline across developed democracies. For instance, only one per cent of the British population are members of political parties in 2014 as compared to 20 per cent in 1950 (The Economist, 2014). If one observed, the big debate in the 2015 British elections had been on the inequalities and the economic biases facing the peoplethe growing inequalities and the failures of the capitalist system to hold democracy straight. It is estimated that the collective wealth of Britains richest has more than doubled in ten years. Worldwide studies further confirm that more than half of the voters do not have trust in their governments. If kleptocracy potentially can deliver and replace democracy, should we let it fade away?

C S SUNDARESAN President of Alliance for Advanced Research and Development Initiatives, an independent think tank

Email: cs.sundaresan@hotmail.com

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Democracy on the decline - The New Indian Express

Common Dreams

We Are MourningBut We Are Marching And Organizing for Democracy and the Earth Common Dreams For democracy: we must have universal automatic voter registration, transparent voter registration rolls, a four-day national holiday for voting, elimination of all electronic voting machines, universal hand-counted paper ballots, automatic recounts at ...

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We Are MourningBut We Are Marching And Organizing for Democracy and the Earth - Common Dreams

Greeces prime minister Alexis Tsipras at a party meeting in the Greek parliament last May: The whole of Europe has a Grecian feel now. Photograph: Milos Bicanski/Getty Images

Hard questions for democracies have piled up with a speed we have yet to take in. After the cold war, westerners asked how to stand up to autocrats. Should we intervene to stop genocide in Bosnia? Or demand sanctions and boycotts to protect the rights of Tibetans? The rise of communist China, Putins Russia and Erdoans Turkey changed the terms of debate. The question was no longer should we intervene, but could we intervene against powers more than able to resist pressure?

Now that the Trump administration has slouched towards Washington to be born and strongmen have muscled their way into the chancelleries of eastern Europe, the question is more basic: how are supposed democracies different from actual dictatorships?

Greece, the birthplace of democracy, is rarely included in the list of countries that have sunk into corrupt and mendacious authoritarianism. The fact that Syriza is held to be a leftwing rather than a rightwing populist regime is thought to be a distinction of supreme importance by the kind of people who think Paul Mason is an intellectual. Yet the arrival in power of the coalition of the radical left did not stop the corruption scandals in Greek politics. Nor did it usher in a new age of freedom.

Instead, Syriza has shown that concepts of left and right cannot explain the brute realities of 21st-century power. They are almost an irrelevance now. If Donald Trump is right wing, for instance, why do free-market conservatives and national security Republicans fear him so? If Syriza is left wing, why is it in alliance with the ultra-nationalists and religious obscurantists of the Independent Greeks party?

As always, you must never let your eye be distracted from the constraints that bind the powerful and the violence with which they fight against them. This week, the Greek supreme court, the Areopagus, may, at its governments behest, overturn a constraint that has bound European governments since the fall of the 20th-century tyrannies. The Greek novelist Apostolos Doxiadis tells me he has dropped his writing to campaign about a case that goes to the heart of what Europe thinks it is and what it is in danger of becoming.

Greeces degeneration into a baklava republic would be bad enough on its own

Here is why. On 16 July 2016, the night of the doomed coup against Recep Erdoan, three Turkish search-and-rescue crews were ordered by their commanding officer to pick up casualties from an emergency situation in the centre of Istanbul. Their helicopters met intense gunfire. They saved who they could and retreated back to base.

By their account, they had no foreknowledge of the coup. They could not raise their commanders on their return. But when they turned on the television and saw soldiers being lynched, eight of the airmen decided to flee to Greece. Their reason for thinking they would find sanctuary may soon leave a bitter taste: because it is Europe.

For them and millions of others, Europe was as much an idea as a continent. After the defeat of fascism and communism, and in Greeces case the overthrow of the colonels junta in 1974, Europe stood for the rule of law and human rights. By definition, it opposed those familiar instruments from the age of the dictators: arbitrary arrest, show trials, torture and the death penalty.

Erdoan has used the excuse of the coup to purge Turkish society of every potential centre of opposition. To check off the above list, Erdoans forces have arrested Kurdish politicians for being Kurds. They have used the flimsiest of pretexts to put journalists on trial for spreading terrorist propaganda. To the surprise of no one, defence lawyers have made credible accusations of torture. Meanwhile, Turkeys nationalist right is campaigning to restore the death penalty.

The eight officers were arrested within hours of landing. Far from respecting due process and the rule of law, Erdoan was able to boast that Syrizas leader and the luckless Greeks prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, had assured me the officers will be extradited. Tsipras did not contradict the implicit accusation that he was interfering with the Greek courts.

The only evidence offered by the Turkish state against the officers is the unanswered phone calls they made to their commander, who has since been arrested as a participant in the putsch. The officers say they were merely seeking further instructions from their superiors amid the confusion.

In a well-run country, the courts would ignore the prime minister. Its not that simple in Greece. Doxiadis, who has the outrage of a Greek Zola, says: In a true democracy, Mr Tsiprass kowtowing to Mr Erdoan would be merely contemptible, a blatant attempt to gain personal favour at the expense of human rights. But in todays Greece they are cause for great alarm. The president of the Greek supreme court is a government appointee. We will soon find out how far the independence of the Greek judiciary extends.

Greeces degeneration into a baklava republic would be bad enough on its own. The story of that degeneration is also worth retelling as a warning to the political equivalent of sex tourists to stop getting their rocks off on fantasies about socialist governments far from home.

But the case of the airmen is wider than that. The whole of Europe has a Grecian feel now. The EU cut a deal with Erdoan to keep out the refugees, whose presence on Europes streets has provoked a continent-wide backlash. Talk to him too harshly and he could tear it up. If Trump allies with Putin, the rest of Nato may not think they can stand up to Russia alone. As for isolated Britain, its leaders will find every excuse to sell arms to every dictatorship from Riyadh to Beijing. Any trade will soon be better than no trade.

The only argument against appeasement is the realistic argument that it will not work. Erdoan has gone mad. He roams around his 1,000-room palace ranting against his opponents. Putin, likewise, has made it clear that the west is his enemy. Nothing we can do will make him change his mind.

As fate would have it, the Greek supreme court was named after the Areopagus of classical Athens, which heard the trials of antiquity. Aeschylus in the Oresteia sent Orestes there to seek protection from the Furies. Athena tells him:

Whether eight Turkish airmen can find justice and avert the bitter blame is not just a question for them, but for a continent tormented by Furies of its own.

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Fate of eight Turkish airmen is an acid test for democracy - The Guardian