https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Turkish_presidential_elec...
Maybe the referendum was rigged, I don’t know. But centralizing more power in the executive, if that’s what the people want, isn’t necessarily anti democratic.
Speak for yourself; as someone who understands what (note: what, not who) POTUS represents and why the Electoral College even exists, I hope our system does not change for vapid reasons.
Direct election of POTUS across state lines is going to reduce democracy, not increase it.
Erdogan famously remarked: "Democracy is like a train, he said; you get off once you have reached your destination"
Or you could pick up a ballot pre-filled-in with the straight communist ticket to save time and just put it straight in the urn. Naturally anyone in the room could see which you chose.
Perhaps more amusingly: he was an exchange student at the time (late 60s?). Because communism was a universal movement anyone could vote, so he thought, “well why not while I have the chance?”
Also, don't fall to the expressions like, "Turkish here", "German there". These does not make anyone expert nor without bias.
Here are a few other biased sources offering their subjective judgements:
- https://freedomhouse.org/country/turkey/freedom-world/2022
- https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/turkeys-local-elections-wer...
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud_and_violence...
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index
- https://www.idea.int/democracytracker/report/turkey/december...
This is not to say that Turkey is full autocracy: the incubent president has a genuinely large amount of support and it's quite possible they would win a free and fair election. However, the upcoming election will not be free and fair as those terms are commonly understood.
This is kind of skewed though, if people can't go on TV or Twitter and say "Erdogan doesn't know what he's doing and his policies are foolish".
This is really the modern autocrat's secret weapon: have reasonably(-ish) fair(-ish) elections, but also rig things in such a way that people only hear one side of the story. It's not a surprise people support Erdogan if they only hear how brilliant he is with tepid criticism at best. Control the narrative → control the vote. Ergodan, Putin, Xi all play by this book.
Having a free press and free investigative journalism is critical; without it you don't really have fair elections, even if the actual business of casting and counting ballots is sound and free of fraud.
Hardly: Mussolini also had some sort of elections. It just happened that parliamentarians who were too much of a nuisance had unfortunate encounters with groups of hard batons, or were required to live on remote islands. In Putin's Russia they fall from balconies.
It's just not funny anymore. Some people in Turkey might enjoy living under a dictator (after all, many did in Italy and Germany, and many do in a lot of other countries today), but let's not pretend that water is not wet.
Exactly! I'm from another global south country. Usually when someone on these sites say "${their_country} here" I prepare myself for the worst takes because I know this happens in my country, usually it's some liberal who read/work in western leaning media and repeat what they hear. It's an echo chamber so huge that you can't touch it's walls so it's hard to know you actually live in an echo chamber.
[1] https://freedomhouse.org/country/turkey/freedom-world/2022
All of these restrictions on freedom might have been introduced for good reason according to some people, but they very much have been introduced, and very much restricted freedom, so if those don’t count according to freedom house, I can scarcely consider this “quantitative nonpartisan analysis” to be worth much.
"Democracy," in the sense that refers to the democratic systems of government in existence, is a bundle. Elections without free press, expression, freedom to organize and such... That's no longer "democracy" in that sense of the term.