Bloomberg View: Erdoğan's Dangerous Power Grab

Protests against plans to replace an Istanbul park with a shopping mall have spread across Turkey, metastasizing into something far more politically significant. While the demonstrations aren’t the start of a Turkish Spring, they show why Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s design to turn his country into a presidential republic next year should be stopped.

Turkey has too few checks and balances on the prime minister’s power, and its democratic foundations—including an independent judiciary, free media, and strong political parties—are shallow. This is why the country cannot afford Erdoğan’s plans to have the constitution altered to give the president, a largely ceremonial figure, the authority to issue decrees with the force of law, to dissolve parliament, to call elections, and to decide whether to send the military into action. Such a change would concentrate too much power in the hands of a single figure.