Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and several officials from his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) are preparing to introduce a system change that would allow settling more issues through presidential decrees or regulations, taking them out of parliamentary procedures, the pro-government Türkiye newspaper reported on Sunday.
Erdoğan, who has already assumed several powers that used to belong to parliament, reportedly complained at a meeting with senior AKP members that parliament has been operating like a “law manufacturing factory” and expressed his distaste that the legislature always has to work long hours even to pass the smallest bills that could easily be resolved by presidential decree or by simple regulations, according to the report.
The legal experts among the senior party members, along with the relevant officials from the presidential office, are working on a new arrangement to remove the obligation to submit bills for every legislative proposal so as to prevent every issue from being subject to parliamentary approval.
The planned modifications aim to render the legislative system more efficient, said the pro-government daily, without providing any details as to their scope.
Turkey had previously passed a constitutional amendment package that included the adoption of a presidential system of governance in place of a parliamentary system, which has already resulted in the transfer of several legislative powers from parliament to Erdoğan. The package, put to a referendum in April 2017, was approved by a narrow margin, and some of its provisions took effect after the presidential and parliamentary elections of June 2018.