The innuendo of the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, that in the June 2023 elections it will be for last time candidate for head of state has triggered a debate in Turkey about the legality of his candidacy, according to reports this Sunday in the Turkish press.
“On the strength of your support, which we asked the nation for the last time in our own name in 2023, we will start building the Century of Turkey and hand over this blessed flag to the youth,” Erdogan said on Saturday, quoted by the daily ‘ Cumhuriyet’, in a speech in the city of Samsun.
Interpretation
The Turkish opposition interprets the sentence to mean that Erdogan he does not intend to re-introduce to the position of president in the 2028 elections, but the doubts reach whether the Constitution allows him to do so legally in 2023.
“Tayyip Erdogan announces that he is running for the last time in the elections in 2023. But article 101 of the Constitution and the presidential electoral law tell you that in 2023 it is already impossiblesir,” Social Democratic MP Ali Mahir Basarir wrote on Twitter.
Erdoğan was prime minister between 2003 and 2014when he was elected president under the current Constitution of 2007, which established elections at the polls for a largely representative position of five years, with the option of repeating only once.
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In 2017, Erdogan promoted another Constitutional reform, approved by a slim majority in a referendum, which eliminated the figure of the prime minister and transferred executive powers to the president. A year later he won the presidential elections, under the new system, which also allows only two terms.
According to the opposition, having been elected president in 2014 and 2018Erdogan has already exhausted his two shifts and cannot appear in June 2023. The ruling AKP party, for its part, interprets that the shifts should be counted from 2018, since then the attributions of the position will substantially change and as it is a different system.