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Comment by notzorbo3 | Hacker News Reader

I have not gotten the feeling that Turkey is no longer a democracy? I have to admit that I haven't researched it much, but I haven't heard anything in the mainstream media about fraud during the elections or the referendum to expand the presidents powers. The whole coup was a disaster of course, and the way Erdogan reacted is without a doubt dictatorial in nature. But I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of the people are actually supportive of him, much like people are supportive of Putin in Russia.

I've always found it kinda weird that as soon as people in different countries vote for something we don't like, we consider them no longer democratic.

BUT, like I said, I haven't researched it well enough, so I might be entirely off the mark here. If you have any info on this, I'd love to hear it.

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Democracy is more than just casting and counting votes. It's the biggest trick of tyrants to convince the people that so long as they can vote they're free (see: Putin, Erdogan). Full functioning democracy requires a strong, independent media, quality institutions, an independent judiciary, all of which are accountable and responsive to their constituents. It also requires eternal vigilance because these conditions are vulnerable to despotism, so you always need to be on the lookout (see: Trump, UK tories and the repeal bill, Poland, Hungary)

The usual distinction is "democracy" vs liberal democracy. The first is illiberal and the second places an importance on the rule of law.

By that fairly holistic definition, I wouldn't particularly call the UK or US democracies. At the very least, not healthy and thriving ones.

Very well said. However a true functioning democracy require more than these unfortunately. At least in order to have those well functioning institutions you need an entity that can expose groups who have hijacked them.

Countries like Turkey who have been on the losing side of power game for at least couple of centuries, or countries like Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Greece that were non-existent before but either their borders drawn with a ruler on the map or too weak to stand alone are under heavy influence of foreign agents/powers. Heck, even US is under heavy influence of interest groups to the extent that public was sold on to the idea of Iraq's invasion. Even then most Americans opposed the Iraq war but their voices were drowned by heavy media bombardment.

Take Iran. Once they had their own elected government but CIA staged a coup [1] and installed Shah. Think for once, if a country is run with democracy, but a real one, would they throw a democratic country and install a dictator instead? US is a very strong country in many respects and hides many large cracks. Don't be fooled by its looks.

You need more than institutions to have a real democracy. It is not easy to have people's voice heard.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/19/cia-admits-rol...

CIA might have installed a different Shah, but the Iranian republic existed since 1906 till 1921, and the new Shah was a son of the previous one.

At least, so says Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran#From_the_1800s_to_the_194...

When you do your research you will find that you are right.

A dictator gets over 95% of popular votes. Like in Syria, Egypt, North Korea. In 2015 elections (second in the last) Erdogan's party lost majority to form the government by itself (got 40%). After months of negotiations/bargaining political system could not produce a government and elections are done again and this time they could get the enough majority (49%).

The system in Turkey does not allow irregularities. All political parties have the right (and they do) to be represented at the voting polls. They are the very people who run the process at every polling station, from getting ID cards, finding voters in registries, counting the votes after polls are closed, etc. As you have said you can not find such fraud cases since other political parties and each one of them has to be complicit for a fraud.

A huge number of journalists is being arrested in Turkey. Turks who say bad things about Erdogan and/or Turkey on social media often get arrested.

> I have to admit that I haven't researched it much, but I haven't heard anything in the mainstream media about fraud during the elections or the referendum to expand the presidents powers

Unsurprisingly, there were major (in the order of millions of votes) frauds.

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