Explained: Erdoğan vs. the Constitutional Court

The current showdown between Turkey’s Constitutional Court, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been a long time coming. As the country awaits the Court’s decision on whether the 10 percent parliamentary election threshold is unconstitutional, government officials have lined up familiar arguments: A ruling in favor of lowering the threshold would amount to a politically motivated attempt to suppress the elected “national will” and Turkey’s authentic rulers. The decision - although not legally binding - comes at a sensitive time for the AKP, which needs to secure two thirds of seats in parliament in the June 2015 election to pass the constitutional change necessary to create an executive presidential system, (which will be almost impossible with a more proportional electoral system).

Over its more than 12 years in power, the AKP has moved to secure control over all levers of the Turkish state. Defenders say that it merely seeks to assert the government’s democratic legitimacy over a “tutelage regime” of institutions that were never truly neutral in the first place; critics say it amounts to an authoritarian “partification” of the state apparatus. The various branches of Turkey’s judicial system have been on the front line of this struggle, and the Constitutional Court now appears to be the one of the last fortresses left for the government to conquer. Throughout 2014, the Court has angered Erdoğan and the AKP with a series of liberal rulings, including its lifting of the Twitter ban in April and its lifting of the YouTube ban in May, on the grounds that both were a violation of freedom of expression. Also in April this year, the Court annulled parts of a contentious law that gave the...