Law and Politics in Turkey: What Metin Feyzioglu's Downfall Means For Judiciary?
The president of Turkey's Bar Association aligned himself with the regressive and reactionary politics of the post-coup era. None of his political patrons were able to save him from his doom.
In 2014, Metin Feyzioglu, then-President of the Union of Turkey’s Bar Associations (TBB), was catapulted to national fame when he rattled off one incriminating charge after another against then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his corrupt government “at a ceremony marking the Council of State’s 146th anniversary.” His televised tantrums from the podium unsettled the visiting prime minister who was among the audience. The irritated Erdogan then literally stirred President Abdullah Gul and Chief of Staff Gen. Necdet Ozel into leaving the ceremony before expressing his disapproval of the way Feyzioglu spoke (no less than an hour in breaking with the protocol) and dismissing his charges as baseless.
That public revolt against Erdogan made Feyzioglu a man to be reckoned with among Kemalist/nationalist opposition. But it did not take long for a radical shift in his political standing. In less than a month after the coup in summer 2016, he politically re-aligned himself with Erdogan, who ascended to the presidency after Gul’s departure two years earlier, by shedding his critical past stance. The lawyer’s rise and fall in Turkey’s tangled web of legal and political affairs came to a dramatic end on Sunday when he lost his bid for re-election for one of the most influential posts in the country’s judicial hierarchy. Few people shed tears for his downfall, while many visibly demonstrated their joy for Feyzioglu’s fall from grace.
According to the non-official results of the election that would dramatically reshape the politics and practicalities of defense in the legal landscape, Erinc Sagkan won the votes of 181 delegates in an upset victory that involved 348 delegates in total.
The elections unmistakably evoked the memories of the municipal polls in 2019. President Erdogan’s handpicked candidate Binali Yildirim, the last serving prime minister of Turkey’s governmental system, suffered a stinging defeat against main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) candidate Ekrem Imamoglu in Istanbul in an election that was repeated after the president’s party refused to concede the result with a narrow margin in March 2019. The June rerun was a landslide victory for Imamoglu who prudently steered clear of any mention of the president’s name during his election campaign and only focused on how to improve municipal service to Istanbul’s increasingly disgruntled residents.
The underdog Sagkan’s triumph has more than a passing resemblance to the municipal elections where the powerful lost after voters issued their verdict freely. Journalist Fatih Portakal was quick to draw a similar conclusion. He equated Feyzioglu’s defeat to an electoral debacle for the AKP and MHP.
“The curtain has been opened with the losses of Ankara and Istanbul. Now they suffered a shock in the Bar Association polls. Step by step approaching, there are elections next in line. President must be brooding!”
Monday marked the end of the Feyzioglu era within TBB whose structure has recently come under tremendous political strain after the presidential cabinet’s relentless efforts to curb its independent nature through a set of measures put to vote in Parliament earlier this year. The political drive to redesign bar associations set off backlash and monthlong protests by lawyers and legal unions across cities.
Without a doubt, the outcome at the weekend registered growing disapproval of Erdogan’s meddling in legal affairs, the attempts to alter the institutional structure and personnel of the judiciary. The bottom line is even strongman politics would suffer defeat in freely-held elections. It was certainly what happened in Ankara at the weekend.
“It is symbolically very valuable that Metin Feyzioglu is leaving. The law is not the matter. The matter is seeing that acting “like Feyzioğlu” has a cost. He thought, “I will lean on the government, change the law and stay here as if not happened.” It did not work out. This is really important,” said Kerem Altiparmak, a law professor who was dismissed during the blanket purge following the 2016 putsch.
The vote was a referendum on Feyzioglu’s tumultuous tenure characterized by his condoning to political subversion of the judiciary. His connivance with the oppressive politics for self-promotion did no good for him in the final stage.
During the later course of his presidency, he tried to use Bar Association as a launchpad for his political aspirations manifested in his ill-fated bid for CHP chairmanship. Left-leaning journalist Enver Aysever noted on his commentary after Feyzioglu’s loss that the former president was the professed candidate of Onder Sav and secular ultra-nationalists, whose political creed differs from the mainstream secular Kemalists, for CHP leadership. “Do not forget.” he wrote on Twitter.
Political Alignment With Erdogan
Following his political alignment with the president in the aftermath of 2016, the outgoing TBB head gave his full-throated endorsement to the government’s indiscriminate purge policy against opponents of different social affiliations and political persuasion. He became a supporting figurehead when the government stamped out any trace of dissent within the ranks of the judiciary, throttled the last vestiges of judicial independence and rule of law. Instead of siding with the purged and imprisoned judges, prosecutors, and lawyers, he endorsed and even enabled policies that crushed the lives of his colleagues. Feyzioglu did not show any compunction when he supported the crackdown on Kurdish politicians either. His lowest moment came at a public conference in Washington, D.C., in August 2016 when he flatly denied the existence of torture in police custody following the abortive coup in Turkey, even after the state-run Anadolu news agency unwittingly released the video footage of tortured generals.
From a mere judicial perspective, his role in denying the defendants the legal right to defense during post-coup trials was driven by a trade-off that ironically served to displace the established pillars of the judiciary in a way detrimental to his own ideological worldview, the basic tenets of rule of law, and the cardinal concept of separation of powers. He simply enabled a political machine bent on remaking the judiciary in its mirror image by ensuring the subordination of legal channels and procedures to political ends.
For all the detrimental aspects of his choices, Feyzioglu’s newfound rapport with the new political regime that found its expression in the de facto ruling coalition between Justice and Development Party (AKP) and Nationalist Action Party (MHP) was not without personal benefits. In return, President Erdogan sought to subdue critical bar associations through Feyzioglu by expanding the latter’s authority against other fellows. Needless to say, Feyzioglu’s self-serving agenda proved costly for the institutional cohesion of the TBB and its provincial branches across Turkey.
According to the legal expert Kasim Akbas, the reason that many people have rejoiced at Feyzioglu’s loss is a number of unpleasant facts that shaped the election result. “… To have Feyzioglu elected, they [the government] divided bar associations, postponed elections, and stretched the law… TBB has become a symbol. This is only the beginning…” he tweeted.
To facilitate his re-election, Feyzioglu’s political patrons sought to contrive dividing bar associations, cracking down on his rival Sagkan, and suspending elections citing the pandemic. In the end, this shameless political chicanery only ensured the thin-skinned Feyzioglu’s undoing.
Cenk Yigiter, another purged legal scholar, was cautious to join the chorus for celebrating the demise of the unpopular TBB head. He mused that it is more important to get rid of the darkness that brought Feyzioglu to high-profile positions such as the Dean of Ankara University Law Department, Ankara Bar Association, and finally the TBB — the Union of Turkey’s Bar Associations — in the first place.
The deposed TBB president’s remarkable ascent through the ranks of college and lawyer hierarchy is almost unparalleled and owes more to his networking skills (and dynamics of judicial politics) than his personal credentials.
The prophecy and truth
The winner Sagkan pledged to reunite the fragmented bar associations under the umbrella of TBB. “None of our citizens would be left without legal defense,” he vowed, in open reference to the Feyzioglu era when many defendants were denied to access to legal counsel during trials.
A week before the election, candidate Sagkan offered lengthy documentation of Feyzioglu’s contested legacy in the judiciary. He criticized his predecessor for facilitating the political control of the judicial mechanisms for mere personal ambitions. His remarks and choices, the new TBB head reasoned, were in harmony with the government’s anti-democratic policies that have inexorably snuffed out rule of law and judicial independence.
A state of lawlessness for the past four years, he averred, has been imposed upon the country through legal channels. Law, Sagkan accentuated, came to represent the lawlessness and was made by political rulers to serve the very same lawlessness across the social spectrum and body politic. All the while, Feyzioglu’s discourse scrambled to legitimize the government’s illiberal and unlawful policies, according to the incoming president who spoke with Mezopotomia News Agency in an exclusive interview last week.
That, he wisely suggested, would prove Feyzioglu’s unmaking for the weekend’s vote.
The result only vindicated Sagkan’s personal conviction and observation with regards to Metin Feyzioglu’s record on the job. He won, Feyzioglu lost. Turkey won, Erdogan lost; law won and politics lost.