Karabekir Akkoyunlu
To make sense of the Turkish government’s response to the Covid-19 outbreak, we must put it in the context of the country’s dramatic transition through a chain of crises over the past few years. In July 2016, Turkey suffered a failed military coup. Calling it a “gift from God”, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared a nationwide State of Emergency (SoE) and started ruling by executive decree, overseeing a purge of historic proportions that targeted government opponents in the civil service, judiciary, police, military, civil society, media, universities and politics. In April 2017, with the country still under the SoE, 51% of the electorate approved constitutional changes in a referendum to replace Turkey’s parliamentary system with a strong executive presidentialism. The new system equipped the president with far-reaching powers, while severely eroding legislative and judicial checks on the executive branch. The referendum also made permanent the presidential decrees passed under the SoE. In an act of self-coup, the Constitutional Court, increasingly packed with Erdoğan appointees, announced that it did not have the authority to review the constitutionality of these decrees.
In June 2018, Turkey held its first elections under the new system. Erdoğan won the presidential vote in the first round, while the right-wing alliance between his Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the far-right Nationalist Action Party (MHP) secured 366 of the 600 parliamentary seats. The elections were originally scheduled for late 2019, but were brought forward to avoid the fallout from the country’s deepening economic crisis. That fallout came the following year, when the Turkish lira lost nearly half of its value and popular discontent over mismanagement, corruption and nepotism spilled to the AKP’s own electoral base. In the municipal elections of March 2019, the ruling party lost control of nearly all the major cities, including Ankara, the capital, and Istanbul, the country’s cultural and financial centre, both of which were under Islamist local governments since 1994, to the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP).
Erdoğan almighty?
In short, at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, President Erdoğan was in an institutionally dominant, but politically and economically weakened position. His government’s response to the crisis reflects this state of affairs. If the Turkish president has not used the pandemic as an opportunity for a blatant power grab à la Viktor Orbán of Hungary, that is because such a feat was already achieved in Turkey between 2016 and 2018. As a result, Turkey’s response to the crisis has been almost exclusively conceived, coordinated, carried out and even contested by actors within the executive branch, with no effective input or oversight role played by the parliament or the judiciary. While the Erdoğan government has pushed measures to maintain its tight grip over state and society, its handling of the crisis has also reflected its political and economic fragilities.
The Turkish government has credited itself for taking swift and decisive action in dealing with the coronavirus crisis and even providing assistance to countries in need, including Spain and the United Kingdom. On 10 January, the Ministry of Health set up the Coronavirus Scientific Advisory Board, composed of medical experts and scholars. Flights from China and Iran were suspended on 3 February, followed by Italy, South Korea and Iraq on 29 February. Schools and universities were closed on 12 March, the same day when the Health Minister announced the country’s first confirmed case of Covid-19. The first death was reported on 17 March, weeks after most of Turkey’s neighbours as well as much of Europe and Asia, between which the country serves as a busy transit hub. The numbers then rose sharply despite the government’s insistence that the crisis was under control. On 18 April, Turkey overtook China to become the country with the seventh highest number of reported cases in the world.
From the outset there have been allegations that the government, concerned about its political image and the state of the economy, was concealing the true extent of the pandemic in the country. Authorities detained hundreds of people for their social media posts and publicly chastised medical workers who challenged the official narrative of a health system more than capable of handling the crisis. Suspicions of a “hidden toll” mounted on the basis of reports, such as the one revealing a major spike in recorded deaths from all causes in Istanbul in March and April from same period in previous years.[1] With independent journalists muzzled or marginalised, and in the absence of a legislature willing and able to carry out its oversight duties, such allegations could not be properly investigated, unless picked up and scrutinised by the international press.
Byzantine palace intrigues
The process also revealed cracks between the agencies of the executive branch tasked with handling the crisis. While the Health Minister Fahrettin Koca, a medical doctor, appealed for strict social isolation measures, President Erdoğan insisted that “the wheels of the economy must keep turning”. Members of the Scientific Advisory Board anonymously complained that their recommendations to the government were falling on deaf ears. One consistent advice voiced by the medical community, and supported by 90% of the population according to one poll, was the imposition of curfews in localities where the outbreak was particularly severe.[2] Facing economic abyss, President Erdoğan, who is otherwise no stranger to imposing draconian measures, resisted this call for weeks. His hawkish Minister of the Interior, Süleyman Soylu, urged citizens to “declare their individual SoEs” and claimed that those who were agitating for a curfew were supporters of terrorist organisations.
It was the same Interior Minister, who, in an unexpected twist, announced on the evening of 11 April a 48-hour curfew in 31 cities across the country. The announcement, which came mere hours before the measure was due to come into effect, led to mass confusion and panic buying that defied provisions of social distancing. In the face of unusually sharp criticism from pro-government circles, Soylu announced his resignation, declaring his “eternal loyalty” to President Erdoğan. Amidst street demonstrations by ultra-nationalist supporters of the Interior Minister, Erdoğan rejected the resignation. Although it might appear at first sight that the resignation was a rare of act of public accountability by a senior official, a closer look suggests that both the botched announcement and the subsequent drama were part of a byzantine power struggle within the Erdoğan regime between rival factions; one led by the ambitious Interior Minister and the other by Erdoğan’s son-in-law and heir apparent, Treasury and Finance Minister Berat Albayrak.[3]
Municipalities targeted, Parliament subdued
The Covid-19 outbreak did not put an end to the feud between the central government and opposition-held municipalities. The executive branch stepped up its efforts to disrupt any measure taken by these local authorities to cope with the outbreak that could contribute to their popularity. The Interior Ministry suspended public donation campaigns launched by the Istanbul and Ankara municipalities, with President Erdoğan accusing their mayors of trying to establish “a state within a state”. In the city of Antalya, a soup kitchen run by the local CHP municipality that catered to the rising number of unemployed was shuttered because it had not been authorised by the state-appointed governor.[4] Opposition-held municipalities were also kept in the dark about government decisions that would require preparation, such as the curfew declaration.
Finally, several draft laws tabled for a vote in the parliament in response to the Covid-19 crisis revealed the ruling coalition’s continued preoccupation with keeping the opposition and the society-at-large in its tight grip. An amnesty law, adopted on 14 April, is aimed at preventing the spread of the virus in prisons with the early release of 90,000 inmates, but excludes journalists, rights activists, and political prisoners mostly from the pro-Kurdish leftist Peoples’ Democracy Party (HDP), who are facing terrorism charges.[5] Although the CHP has appealed to the Constitutional Court for a review of the legislation, expectations for a timely and independent decision by the country’s top judicial body are minimal.
Another case was a proposed regulation to expand the government’s control and censorship of social media. Tucked inside an emergency omnibus bill, the draft law would oblige major platforms, such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, to appoint a legal representative in Turkey, who would ensure swift compliance with court decisions to remove content and block users, and provide regular reports of their activities. Non-compliance would result in bandwidth restrictions, fines and closures.[6] Circulated at the same time as the amnesty law was being voted on, the so-called “censorship law” drew national and international reaction, and was ultimately withdrawn from the final draft of the omnibus bill. Judging by the ruling party’s past strategy of dropping controversial proposals when faced with a public backlash, only to reintroduce them later when the opposition is demobilised, the chances are that this proposal too will return to the parliament in due course.
However, more than any law, perhaps the most poignant symbol of the parliament’s self-inflicted drift to impotency under Erdoğan came after the passage of the omnibus bill, when deputies from the AKP and the MHP voted for a legislative recess until the end of May.[7] Outside of regular summer breaks, this is the longest closure in the history of the Turkish parliament, which, in a grim irony, celebrated its centennial on 23 April. Without even the appearance of legislative oversight, the executive branch is left on its own to govern the crisis – and the country – as it wishes.
[1] “Istanbul Death Toll Hints Turkey Is Hiding a Wider Coronavirus Calamity”, New York Times, 20 April 2020.
[2] Metropoll, Turkey’s Pulse, March 2020, http://www.metropoll.com.tr/research/social-research-12/1847.
[3] Ahmet Şık, “Al takke yok külah”, Bir Artı Bir Forum, 17 April 2020, https://www.birartibir.org/siyaset/673-al-takke-yok-kulah.
[4] Tessa Fox, “Brother Tayyip’s Soup Kitchen”, Foreign Policy, 17 April 2020.
[5] “Outrage over denial of amnesty for Turkish political prisoners”, Guardian, 31 March 2020.
[6] “Turkey Seeks Power to Control Social Media”, Human Rights Watch, 13 April 2020.
[7] “CHP urges parliament not to recess due to COVID-19”, Hurriyet Daily News, 15 April 2020.
