Noah Feldman, Columnist

The Politics of a Constitutional Crisis

Intense partisanship in the UK, Turkey and Poland -- and soon the U.S. -- is testing the strength of each system of government.

December 23, 2016 at 1:05 PM UTC

By Noah Feldman

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

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Photographer: WOJTEK RADWANSKI/AFP/Getty Images

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Many constitutional systems around the globe have been tested in 2016. Turkey, Poland, the UK, the U.S. -- each case sheds some light on how different constitutional arrangements respond to the challenges of political factions.

Begin with the worst constitutional crisis, the one that is taking place in Turkey in the aftermath of a coup attempt against the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The background is complicated: Erdogan’s AK Party won national elections in 2002, 2007 and 2015; Erdogan himself was directly elected president in 2014. All these elections were pretty clean, and most observers accept that a plurality of Turks have preferred Erdogan’s party for a decade and a half.