Turkey Under Erdoğan: An Increasingly Impotent State

SUMMARY

• A central paradox of contemporary authoritarianism is how the concentration of power in the hands of a seemingly omnipotent executive can produce an impotent state.
• After the 6 February 2023 twin earthquakes, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan pledged to be efficient and decisive.
• But disaster governance was marked by delayed decision making, poor coordination, limited capacity for rapid mobilisation and communication and an emphasis on narrative control over effective execution.
• This shows how personalist rule hollows out state institutions, exposing its limits in delivering good governance.

Throughout the 2017 Constitutional Referendum campaign, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, promised that the national transition to a hyper-presidential system would deliver efficiency and decisiveness. Centralising power, he argued, would overcome bureaucratic tutelage, accelerate decision-making and deliver stability. Despite his claims, the government’s response to the 6 February 2023 twin earthquakes tells a different story.

The earthquakes affected 14 million people across eleven provinces, killed over 50,000, and destroyed tens of thousands of buildings. At the very moment when coordinated state action was most urgently needed, the system displayed paralysis. Decision-making slowed, coordination faltered, and institutions struggled to mobilise effectively. The earthquakes thus exposed a paradox: the concentration of power in an omnipotent leader has produced an increasingly impotent state.

Since 2018, sweeping presidential powers over appointments, institutional design and budget have concentrated authority in the presidency. This over-centralisation weakens state capacity by prioritising loyalty over merit to secure political support. The appointment of loyalists not only erodes competence and professionalisation but also prompts micromanagement. In turn, the reduction of state autonomy discourages capable bureaucrats from taking initiative, knowing they can easily be replaced. Thus, loyalists cannot act autonomously because they lack competence, while competent bureaucrats cannot act because they are politically vulnerable.

Turkish bureaucracy is rewarding loyalty over merit

Modern bureaucracies depend on expertise and professional norms. Under hyper-presidentialism, however, key public offices have increasingly been filled through clientelism in which political loyalty substitutes for competence.

The Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD), responsible for coordinating disaster response, illustrates this shift. Its leadership has consisted of centrally appointed officials with limited disaster management expertise. Critics describe the agency as a ‘family farm’, dominated by politically connected allies linked through party or family ties.

The Turkish Red Crescent (Kızılay) became embroiled in controversy after it emerged that it had sold thousands of tents to a charity during the first days of the disaster instead of distributing them directly to survivors. Despite intense public outrage, its head remained in office for months and resigned only after losing elite support within the ruling party.

These cases are part of a broader pattern that has become evident since the 2018 transition to the presidential system. The Turkish Court of Accounts has documented politically motivated appointments as widespread across the bureaucracy, warning that such appointments ‘threaten the effective functioning of Turkey’s public administration’.

A climate of fear and inertia in Turkish government

Effective governance also requires a degree of bureaucratic autonomy to adapt to changing circumstances within defined mandates. Under Erdoğan’s centralised rule, bureaucratic discretion has been replaced by an expectation of full compliance. Ministers and senior officials increasingly depend on presidential approval even for routine decisions, knowing that initiative without authorization carries political risk, whereas obedience ensures survival in office.

This subordination fosters a climate of fear and inertia within the state. During the 2023 earthquakes, officials at every level, AFAD personnel, provincial governors, municipals, and military units, waited for instructions from the presidency. The presidential office’s insistence that all coordination pass through AFAD’s central command slowed mobilisation during the critical early hours when survival rates are highest.

Survivors in heavily affected provinces reported delayed arrivals of AFAD teams, while trained volunteers were told to wait for formal authorisation before intervening. Military units, historically central to disaster logistics and response, were deployed more slowly and in far smaller numbers than in previous major earthquakes. A system designed to eliminate bureaucratic delay instead generated paralysis because relevant institutions could not dare to act without explicit approval.

Interagency disorganization

Excessive centralisation also weakens interagency coordination. Ministries and agencies orient themselves vertically toward the presidency rather than horizontally toward one another. As institutions function primarily as executors of central directives, intermediate layers of horizontal cooperation necessary for coherent policy action erode.

Even before February 2023, AFAD’s internal assessments following smaller earthquakes had identified weaknesses in interagency coordination, communication, logistical preparedness and staffing shortages. These problems resurfaced on a far larger scale after the twin earthquakes.

Provincial coordination boards failed to convene on time, as local coordination mechanisms were bypassed in favour of a central command. Opposition-led municipalities were sidelined in early coordination stages. International search and rescue teams encountered logistical and communication difficulties. Aid distribution was uneven, as supplies accumulated in city centres, leading to spoiled foodstuffs and unusable clothing, while rural communities faced shortages. Delays in delivering sanitation in affected regions increased health risks, and urgent repairs to roads, airports, and ports were slowed by coordination failures.

How Erdoğan responded to criticism

As state capacity and autonomy decline, governance comes to be replaced by image management that glosses over policy failures. Following the disaster, and on the eve of the presidential and general elections in May 2023, the government treated criticism of the disaster response as a challenge to its political survival.

Erdoğan publicly warned that those criticising the government’s response were being “noted”. Twitter (now X) was temporarily restricted. Journalists and numerous citizens were prosecuted for spreading ‘disinformation’. Independent media outlets, Halk TV, Tele 1 TV and Fox TV, were issued astronomical fines, with the former two also receiving programme suspensions.

Progovernment outlets repeatedly declared that disaster relief was ‘under control’, broadcasting selective footage of rescue efforts while downplaying widespread failures. The catastrophe was framed as the ‘disaster of the century’, implying that no state response could have prevented such devastation. Although a video promoting this narrative was later withdrawn, the phrase remains central to official discourse.

The power paradox

The tragedy of the 6 February earthquakes exposed Turkey’s institutional weaknesses. When recruitment prioritizes loyalty over competence and when discretion is replaced by subordination, both state capacity and autonomy erode. Centralisation, praised as a means of ensuring effectiveness, leads to systemic paralysis, especially in times of crisis. The result is what we call the paradox of power: an omnipotent leader presiding over an increasingly impotent state. In its pursuit of unlimited authority, hyper-presidentialism weakens the very institutions it depends upon, degrading governance while eroding its own legitimacy by delegitimising all other social and political actors.