Turkey’s President is becoming a dictator, and the UK is helping him out

Just as Turkey takes a step closer to dictatorship, newly published export statistics show that the UK has been selling its repressive NATO ally millions of pounds’ worth of arms. Effectively giving a green light to its ongoing descent into authoritarianism.

Turkey moving further towards dictatorship

On 21 January, Turkey’s ruling AKP regime passed a controversial reform package to further empower the office of the presidency – currently run by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Al-Monitor describes how the amendments will essentially move the country from a parliamentarian to a presidential system, and how:

The draft contains all the elements that would move Turkey away from the core norms of a pluralist, democratic state of law — separation of powers and a system of checks and balances — and transform it into a majoritarian authoritarian system.

Other media outlets, meanwhile, have spoken of how the amendments “could end Turkey’s republic” and “end its democracy“.

Citizens will vote on the changes in a referendum before the end of April but, as Al-Monitor insists, “the campaign will not take place in a free environment”. Reporters Without Borders (RSF), for example, has called Turkey “the world’s biggest prison for the media profession”. And the arrest of MPs and activists from the opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) has drawn strong criticism from human rights groups like Amnesty International.

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