ABSTRACT
Turkey participated in the Second Wave of Democracy as Samuel P. Huntington suggested in his Third Wave (1991) right after World War II. However, the first multi-party elections of the country conducted in 1946 were neither fair nor free. The opposition Democrat Party (Demokrat Parti, DP) pressured the government to legislate new election laws to render the elections free and fair or otherwise not take part in them. Under the circumstances of the day, the then ruling Republican People's Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP) had to succumb to pressure and negotiate with the opposition, which yielded the first free and fair election laws. The 1950 elections, which took place under the jurisdiction of the new law, accepted the principles of general elections, secret ballot, public count, and the whole practice of campaigning and voting to be managed by the independent judiciary, where the executive branch of the government played no role without the vigil of the judiciary. On almost the 70th anniversary of the 1950 elections in 2018, Turkey seemed to have gone through the motions of legislative elections where the 1950 accords that rendered the Turkish elections democratic were compromised under the emergency rule, where the executive branch began to play a critical role. This chapter focuses on the amended rules of the elections in 2018 and examines whether they provided a level playing field for both the government and the opposition parties and that the standards of the 2018 elections met the 1950 accords or not.
