Lately, I have become convinced that it would be useful to form the legislation and execution via separate elections.

I was born in the first half of the 1960s. Süleyman Demirel had become the prime minister in 1965 and was always the only prime minister for me. This was not the case for my peers born in the US. They first had President Johnson. Then came Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, James Carter, Ronald Reagan, the first George Bush and Bill Clinton. When Demirel first assumed office, Harold Wilson was the prime minister of the UK. After him, the office was taken by Edward Heath, James Callaghan, Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair. In Turkey, however, Demirel was either prime minister or president for the thirty-five years between 1965 and 2000. So he is the first one to come to our mind when it comes to leader hegemony in Turkey. He was in power in thirty-five of the fifty years of my life. He is like family.

The world sulta, originated from Arabic, refers to hegemony. As the Nişanyan Dictionary suggests, there was no such word in Turkish before the 1940s. It was quite prevalent in the 1970s, when I was a kid. But I hear it less frequently today, though it still exists as a phenomenon. Leader hegemony means leader dominance. Turkish politics always has revolved around leaders. This is exactly why the system here has enabled sycophancy to become institutionalized. Did you ever think why? I personally believe that this is directly related to the constitutional design of the government system. It is not that Turkey suffers from an evident weakness of character. Let me tell you why.

Turkey currently is working on a new constitution. So it will be useful to identify the source of past illnesses during the process. The leader hegemony is just one of these. At the heart of leader hegemony lie the flaws in the institutional infrastructure design. With this perspective, we can group administrative systems into two categories: those based on leader hegemony and pluralistic systems. Turkey is a country governed by a parliamentary system. The core of the administrative system, however, always has been a single-man hegemony. This has never changed. The parliamentary system of the UK, for instance, always has been democratic and pluralist. Such classification also applies for presidential systems. Some presidential and parliamentary systems institutionalize sycophancy; others don’t. Turkey is in the first group.

Why Turkey has not been able to develop a democratic and pluralist parliamentary system? The problem is about the design, not at the voting phase. The problem emerges after the elected gathers in Ankara. Then the ties are broken between the people and MPs. The leader of a political party that has succeeded in a democratic election becomes the head of the execution as well as the parliamentary group of the respective political party. Therefore, he or she alone controls the legislation and execution. What is more, the close link between the two appears on the basis of a single election result. A single election forms the parliament, which in turn grows out the execution.

Lately, I have become convinced that it would be useful to form the legislation and execution via separate elections. With this perspective, I have started to think that the presidential system would not be a disaster for Turkey. If the goal is to create a democratic and pluralist administrative system, one way to separate the legislation and the execution could be to decide the two via separate elections. This way, the people would be able to tune the separation of powers in the way they like. For example, in 2006 Lula was elected president with 49 percent of the votes while his party had only 15 percent. But, how can we ensure the coexistence of separate powers? That’s the tricky part and that is worth praising. Another way could be to regulate the internal operation of political parties. But for me, that would be like interfering in the internal affairs of a family and I think it is harder to democratize.

Turkey has to address its past illnesses when making the new constitution. Leader hegemony is among them. The weaknesses of the institutional infrastructure are the cause of leader hegemony and the institutionalization of sycophancy, both in the presidential and the parliamentary systems. And if sycophancy is institutionalized, the control system cannot work.

This commentary was published in Radikal daily on 22.05.2012