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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

When you use quotes around “Democratic” do you mean the elections are rigged? I’m not familiar with the legitimacy or lack thereof of Turkish elections.

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It’s not quite Russia levels of vote fakery, but rather similar to many other backsliding democracies - the incumbent is credibly accused of using their influence to insure victory. See “controversies” on this page, which describes the election where they modified the constitution to give erdogan completely unchecked power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Turkish_presidential_elec...

The subject of that referendum—abolishing indirect election of the president and moving to direct election—is something that people want in America. And the close result on the referendum seems to match opinion polling.

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.

I know “checks and balances” aren’t exactly written in stone by the Athenians, but they seem like an objectively good idea - I’d argue that any attempt to remove them is anti-democratic in a pragmatic sense. See: the situation in Israel as Netanyahu attempts to consolidate power away from the judiciary to protect himself from corruption charges. Also see: “ turkey accounts for 1/3 of the world’s imprisoned journalists”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Turkey

The real story in Israel is more complicated; the courts have taken power from the other branches; it's about time for there to be some kind of correction, and is often the case, the rebound might very well go too far in the other direction, ruining the possibility of a real system of checks and balances. Netanyahu himself may be going along with it to penalize the courts, but it's unlikely to help his court cases directly. The idea that it's supposed to somehow magically help him is a talking point for some of the political parties, but he would probably need some kind of new legislation to grant him immunity.

>is something that people want in America.

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.

https://www.economist.com/special-report/2016/02/04/getting-...

Erdogan famously remarked: "Democracy is like a train, he said; you get off once you have reached your destination"

Not (AFAIK) the elections, but everything else. Highly restricted media (many journalists in jail) and now social media. Many opposition leaders, judges jailed, exiled or otherwise "purged." Over 100k of them. Constant fiddling with the constitution and election system to increase his own power.

"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.

For one nonpartisan quantitative analysis, Freedom House gave Turkey a 32/100 ("not free") score on its 2022 global freedom scale [1].

[1] https://freedomhouse.org/country/turkey/freedom-world/2022

Isn’t freedom house the same one who in 2020 gave top scores to countries that literally arrested people for walking around outside? That forbade people from running their businesses and customers from hiring their services?

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.

Erdogan is a fascist thug. He’s jailed most of his opposition.

One incident even featured a pre-filled ballot indicating a vote for then-ruling parties.

Decades ago one of my profs described his voting experience in the USSR: they had a completely private (“Australian”) voting system where you picked up a ballot, entered a private voting booth, filled out the ballot, then deposited it in the urn.

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?”

They are not elected democratically, and they are not deciding on anything democratically, even though it is "democratic" on paper.

free and fair elections require more than votes being tallied faithfully. They need all the other facets of democracy to function faithfully as well. Such as a free press, freedom of expression, etc.

It's a very subjective judgement and everyone is entitled his or her own opinion. But that one is very biased. As far as elections concerned Turkish election system is very solid as a process and implementation is solid. In the end Erdogan lost Istanbul in the last elections even after that election repeated for only Istanbul, and worse for Erdogan, the second round was much more decisive. People didn't like the election were repeated.

Also, don't fall to the expressions like, "Turkish here", "German there". These does not make anyone expert nor without bias.

Erdogan literally imprisons any opposition leader who comes close to be an actual challenger. He's done it twice already in the last 7 years.

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.

To give everyone an idea of how solid the process is: consider that the opposition candidate widely considered most capable of beating the incumbent president was recently sentenced to two years in jail and removed from politics on the weakest of pretenses: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Ekrem_%C4%B0mamo%C4...

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 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.

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.

> This is really the modern autocrat's secret weapon

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.

> Also, don't fall to the expressions like, "Turkish here", "German there". These does not make anyone expert nor without bias.

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.

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