Political Parties after the Transition to the Authoritarian Presidential System in Turkey: Increasing or Decreasing Importance of Parties?

The Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to office under the parliamentary system as a result of the elections held in November 2002, and after the constitutional amendment in April 2017, the parliamentary system was replaced by the presidential system in Turkey. In order to exercise the powers based on the new system, presidential and parliamentary elections were held concomitantly in June 2018. Thus, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was elected president for the first time in 2014, has had a system in which the legislature has been weakened and the powers of the head of state have been monopolized in the executive branch since 2018. Especially since the second half of the 2010s, authoritarianism in Turkey has deepened. In this environment, it can be assumed that political parties will no longer have a function similar to that of traditional representative democracy. However, political parties have tried to survive by acting as “movement party” in conditions where social movements and civil society were suppressed during the authoritarianization process. The main opposition Republican People's Party's March for Justice from Ankara to Istanbul is one such example. The other strategy of the parties to survive under the new system was to form electoral alliances. In particular, the social democratic main opposition party CHP entered into an electoral alliance with right wing parties under the umbrella of the Nation Alliance.This situation has led political parties to form supra-unions to survive in the new system and to seek a trans-party common program against the ruling coalition. A trend in the opposite direction to the bi-bloc clustering of parties is the consolidation of party splits and the jump in the number of newly established parties, a phenomenon that has not been seen since the 1990s.This is especially the case in elections where even 1 percent of the vote is critical as it increases the bargaining power of small parties.Newly established parties, even if they don’t have the classical political party schema and organization, have gained the power to bargain for parliamentary quotas in the election process. While this was the case on the opposition side, the politics of alliances also developed on the ruling side.However, what is interesting here is that the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), the relatively small party allied with the ruling AKP, did not tend to enter into pre-election coalitions, demand ministries, or form coalitions in the visible sphere. On the contrary, the MHP has positioned itself beyond the traditional politics scene by gaining a foothold and weight in the state apparatus, especially in the security and internal affairs bureaucracy, and by functioning as a brake or imposing an agenda on the ruling party. Therefore, it makes more sense to discuss the influence of political parties according to the differences between authoritarian and democratic regimes. In conclusion, this paper will evaluate how political parties are positioned beyond their traditional representative roles in the new authoritarian system in Turkey and seek theoretical answers to the questions related to the session through this current example.