Erdoğan’s security package will make Turkey a police state, opposition leader says

ANKARA

A controversial domestic security package draft code, which is set to come to parliament this week, would turn Turkey in to a “police state,” according to Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) head Devlet Bahçeli.

“If the code becomes law as it is, in accordance with [President] Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s wishes, Turkey will be engulfed in a catastrophe,” Bahçeli told journalists after his weekly address to MHP lawmakers at parliament on Feb. 3. 

“The country will be doomed to become a police state, before it vanishes completely,” he added. 

The code will grant the police wide ranging new authorities, and has already netted strong reactions from other opposition parties and activist groups. 

The MHP’s deputies will explain the possible negative results of the code during discussions at parliament, Bahçeli stressed.

During his address to the MHP’s parliamentary group, he also slammed the involvement of Erdoğan in the upcoming general elections in favor of his former Justice and Development Party (AKP), saying it was against the principle of constitutional impartiality that the president must respect. 

“The president sees himself as more important than the Turkish nation. He has hit the streets with his title as president and is involved in daily politics,” Bahçeli said.

“But we will also be there wherever he holds a meeting, together with our people” he added. 

The MHP leader said Erdoğan’s open call for votes for the AKP at a Jan. 30 meeting in the Central Anatolian province of Kırşehir was a “judicial trauma.”

“The only thing that the president cares about is his own seat,” Bahçeli said, accusing Erdoğan of “violating the constitution” and even likening the regime in Ankara to North Korea. 

His criticism comes at a time when discussions over a shift from a parliamentary to a presidential system in Turkey have heated up once again. 

Erdoğan, who became Turkey’s first president elected by public vote on Aug. 10 last year, said last month that he believed Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu’s main election promise would be the adoption of the presidential system.

The country is set to hold parliamentary elections on June 7.