Abstract Establishing the Republic of Türkiye on the ashes of the religious-based legal system of the multicultural Ottoman Empire, the Kemalist elite rejected the Ottoman past and imposed an exclusionary constitutional identity grounded in the principles of nationalism and secularism, only partially compliant with liberal-democratic constitutionalism. Thereafter, ethnic-based movements, as well as religiously inspired ones, sought to challenge the Kemalist constitutional identity. The former achieved only minor results, while the latter proved largely unsuccessful until the Justice and Development Party’s (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) accession to power in 2002. Despite its declared intention to better comply with liberal-democratic constitutionalism, the constitutional identity proposed by the AKP encompasses several illiberal features, fully consolidated in a competitive authoritarianism at least from 2010–13. At present, therefore, Türkiye is transitioning from an exclusionary constitutional identity to an illiberal one, both constructed through a dominant state led by charismatic figures and supported by acquiescent constitutional interpreters who have corroborated the misinterpretation of the tenets of the rule of law. This article investigates the content of Türkiye’s constitutional identity, describes the complex path of Türkiye’s identity-building, and questions whether the Kemalist exclusionary approach represented fertile soil for the competitive authoritarianism the country has been experiencing in the AKP era.
Valentina Rita Scotti (Fri,) studied this question.