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On July 9, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will take his oath of office in parliament. Turkey will thus officially move from a parliamentary system to a presidential system. Just 13 years have passed since Turkish officials started EU accession negotiations. At the time, it seemed that democracy, freedom of expression and social harmony were growing.

Now, however, Turkey is preparing to endow its increasingly Islamist, nationalist and authoritarian president with an unprecedented amount of power. The abolition of parliamentary control gives Erdogan sole power over the executive branch of government. And, through his power to appoint important judges, he will also control the judiciary.

Ersin Kalaycioglu, a senior scholar at Sabanci University's Istanbul Policy Center, said the potential consequences remained unclear. "So far, the new system has only been discussed with us in broad lines," Kalaycioglu said. "This means that neither the public nor political scientists know the exact details."

Erdogan has repeatedly stressed that other democracies also have presidential systems. However, Turkey's differs considerably from the US's, as well as from France's, semipresidential system of government. In the United States, for example, the president does not have the power to dissolve Congress.

Erdogan, on the other hand, can dissolve parliament and call elections. In France, parliament appoints the members of the Constitutional Court. In Turkey, on the other hand, the president makes the decisions concerning the high court.

Kalaycioglu points out that Turkey's presidential system caters to autocratic tendencies. "There is a strong civil society in both the US and French systems," he said. "We don't have that."

Erdogan will now also be able to regularly issue presidential decrees. He had previously only been allowed to do so under the rules of the ongoing state of emergency since the failed July 2016 coup. Erdogan will now be able to overrule the judiciary at any time.

The oversight of an independent and impartial judiciary will therefore be effectively impossible. The political scientist Dogu Ergil shares Kalaycioglu's fears. He believes that the separation of powers and the independence of the judiciary have been abolished.

Erdogan's cops suppress LGBT Pride celebrations, once a demonstration of inclusion

Danger of ultranationalism

There is also the question of whether Erdogan's alliance with the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) in the elections on June 24 will increase domestic tensions. Many fear that the hostile stances taken by the MHP, especially toward Kurds, and the party's rejection of certain established democratic values could create an even more nationalist atmosphere in Turkey. Erdogan needs the MHP in order to have a parliamentary majority. This could prove the biggest obstacle to finding a peaceful solution to conflict with Kurdish groups and to Turkey's efforts to meet EU requirements.

Turkey officially applied for EU membership in 1999, and negotiations began on October 3, 2005. However, little progress has been made over the past 13 years. Negotiations were basically halted after the state of emergency was declared two years ago. The Dutch politician Kati Piri, the European Parliament's Turkey rapporteur, told DW that she would like to see an official suspension of accession negotiations.

While Turkey's EU accession process is in danger of being indefinitely suspended, its relations with the United States are also increasingly difficult. Fethullah Gulen, accused by Erdogan of being the mastermind behind the attempted coup in 2016, lives in the United States.

The US is working with a Kurdish militia group in Syria that Erdogan has called a terrorist organization. And Turkey is planning to buy S-400 missile systems from Russia despite opposition within NATO. All this has led to the impasse.

Ergil, the political scientist, pointed to recent opinion polls that showthe United States even less popular in Turkey than it is in Iran. He said increasingly hostile attitudes toward the US and EU were spreading in Turkey even independently of Erdogan's policies.

In Turkey and abroad, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has a polarizing effect. He has been described as a neo-Ottoman "sultan" as well as an authoritarian leader. From his early beginnings campaigning for Islamist causes to leading NATO's second largest military as the president of Turkey, DW explores the rise of the Turkish leader.

After years of moving up the ranks of the Islamist-rooted Welfare Party, Erdogan was elected mayor of Istanbul in 1994. But four years later, the party was ruled unconstitutional on the grounds it threatened Turkey's secularist nature, and was disbanded. He was later jailed for four months for a controversial public reading of a poem, and consequently lost his mayorship over the conviction.

Erdogan co-founded the Justice and Development Party (AKP), which won a majority of seats in 2002. He was made prime minister in 2003. During his first years in office, Erdogan worked on providing social services, improving the economy and implementing democratic reforms. But some have argued that his premiership was also marked by a religious shift in the political sphere.

While Turkey's constitution guarantees the country's secular nature, observers believe Erdogan has managed to purge the "old secularist guard." The Turkish leader has said that one of his goals is to raise a "pious generation." Erdogan's supporters have hailed the Turkish leader's initiatives, arguing that they've reversed years of discrimination against practicing Muslims.

In July 2016, a failed military coup targeting Erdogan and his government left more than 200 people dead, including civilians and soldiers. In the wake of the coup attempt, Erdogan declared a state of emergency and vowed to "clean up" the military. "In Turkey, armed forces are not governing the state or leading the state. They cannot," he said.

Since the failed coup, authorities have launched a nationwide crackdown, arresting more than 50,000 people in the armed forces, police, judiciary, schools and media. Erdogan has blamed Fethullah Gulen, a self-exiled cleric in the US and former ally, and his supporters of trying to undermine the government. But rights groups believe the allegations are a means to solidify his power and influence.

While Erdogan enjoys significant support in Turkey and the Turkish expatriate community, he has been criticized for his heavy-handed policies and military campaigns against Kurdish militants following the collapse of a peace process in 2015. This January, Erdogan launched a deadly offensive into the northern Syrian enclave of Afrin, an operation that was widely condemned by human rights groups.

Having served as Turkey's president since 2014, Erdogan successfully extended his time in office after winning elections in June. The elections marked Turkey's transition to an executive-style presidency. Observers believe the elections will herald a new era for Turkey for better or worse.

Author: Lewis Sanders IV

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Recep Tayyip Erdogan: The sultan of 21st-century Turkey ...