Turkey fell two places to the 98th spot on the 2014 Democracy Index compiled by the Economist magazine's Intelligence Unit, and it is sliding toward an authoritarian regime under the rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the report says.
According to the index, Turkey is continuing to drop in rankings and the deterioration in its score last year was outstripped by Libya and Thailand.
The report says, “Erdoğan's election as president in 2014 poses a new threat to Turkey's democratic institutions,” and added that the regression reflects the “continuing fraying of the social, political and institutional fabric as Turkey becomes steadily more polarized under the increasingly unchecked rule of Erdoğan.”
Pointing out that the Turkish Constitution necessitates that the president be “apolitical” and depicts the presidency as a “largely ceremonial role,” the report stresses that Turkey's president is “neither of these.”
The report states Turkey is a long way from the “authoritarian regime” category; however, it adds that the “current momentum in that direction is a cause for grave concern.”
Turkey is ranked 98 out of 167 countries, sharing its ranking with Lebanon, according to the report, which ranks countries according to election processes, pluralism, government functions, political participation, political cultures and fundamental freedoms. The countries are given scores on a 10-point scale, with “full democracies” scoring between eight and 10 and “authoritarian regimes” scoring below four.
Turkey's score, 5.7 -- categorizing it as a “hybrid regime,” comes before Kenya and after Venezuela.
While Turkey received a score of 5.12 in its electoral process and pluralism, it only scored 3.53 in civil liberties in 2014.
According to the report, Turkey's slide down the index is not much of a surprise, as the nationwide Gezi Park protests in 2013 and Erdoğan's onslaught against Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen in 2014 indicated that democratic values were slipping in Turkey.
The report highlights that Erdoğan is consolidating his position as an “unrivalled political giant.” It stresses that, while doing so, he “repeatedly weakened the rule of law and fostered a corrosively majoritarian democratic culture.”
It says significant concerns regarding polarization in the country and the allocation of powers emerged after Erdoğan's election triumph in the August presidential elections, and provides two examples.
“The first of these [examples] was the polarizing tone of Mr Erdoğan's campaign, which explicitly relied on a rhetoric of ‘us' (his supporters) and ‘them' (everyone else), and which more subtly intimated that the latter group was, en masse, opposed not just to Mr Erdoğan and to his party, but to democracy itself,” the report said in reference to concerns that resulted from the August elections, adding that his narrative suggests that opposing him is to support coups and unaccountable “parallel” powers within the state.
The term “parallel state” was invented by Erdoğan to refer to sympathizers of the faith-based Gülen movement (Hizmet movement), whom he sees as responsible for the Dec. 17 graft probe which involved some ministers and their sons as well as businessmen and bureaucrats.
The report suggests that Erdoğan's campaign was based on whipping up fears of an imminent slide back into those darker days during the coup-eras and that it has needlessly “set back Turkey's prospects of becoming a more normally functioning democracy.”
The second concern raised by Erdoğan's election as president, the report says, is the “way in which it has driven a wedge between the formal and the actual allocation of powers in Turkey.”
According to the Economist's report, the question at stake when Erdoğan was elected president last summer was “whether to move Erdoğan to the presidency with his power undimmed, whether or not he subsequently succeeds in his stated aim of amending the constitution to change Turkey's political system to one with an executive presidency.”
“When a political community comes to understand that the power of the state rests with an individual, rather than with the office to which he or she has been elected, then that community is on a slippery slope as far as democratic norms are concerned,” the report concludes.
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