Under its Constitution of 1982, Turkey is a unitary presidential republic. Since the 2017 referendum took effect in 2018, the directly elected president has been both head of state and head of government; the office has been held by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan since 28 August 2014, with Cevdet Yılmaz as vice president since June 2023. There is no prime minister. Legislative power belongs to a single chamber, the 600-member Grand National Assembly of Turkey (TBMM) in Ankara, chaired by Speaker Numan Kurtulmuş, and the judiciary is headed by a 15-member Constitutional Court alongside the Court of Cassation and the Council of State. The country is divided into 81 provinces, each run by a governor appointed from Ankara.
Almost every feature of that system is traceable to a specific article, or a specific amendment, of one document. So the clearest way to understand how Turkey is governed is to start with the constitution, then look at the institutions it creates and the votes that have reshaped it.
Before 1982: The Constitutions of 1921, 1924 and 1961
Modern Turkey has been governed under four constitutions. The first, of 1921, was adopted by the Grand National Assembly that had opened in Ankara on 23 April 1920 during the War of Independence, while the Ottoman sultan still sat in Istanbul. The second was ratified on 20 April 1924, six months after the republic was proclaimed on 29 October 1923 with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as its first president. It lasted until the military coup of 1960 and placed both legislative and executive power in the assembly.
The third constitution followed the coup of 27 May 1960 and was approved in a referendum on 9 July 1961 with 61.7 percent in favour. It was built around human rights, wrote the phrase "social state" into a Turkish constitution for the first time, added a Senate alongside the National Assembly, and created the Constitutional Court, which was set up on 25 April 1962.
12 September 1980: The Coup That Wrote Today's Constitution
The current constitution was also born in a coup. On 12 September 1980, after parliament had spent months failing to elect a president, the armed forces under General Kenan Evren dissolved the assembly and ruled through the National Security Council. The junta appointed all 160 members of a Consultative Assembly, barred anyone who had belonged to a party, and had it draft a new text between November 1981 and July 1982. Promoting the draft, Evren argued that the 1961 constitution had failed to set proper limits on liberties. The draft went to a referendum on 7 November 1982 and was approved by 91.37 percent on a 91 percent turnout, a vote that also confirmed Evren as president until 1989. The original text gave the army a majority on the National Security Council, banned civil society organisations from political activity and barred parties from working with groups such as trade unions.
Articles 1 to 4: The Clauses No Amendment May Touch
The 1982 constitution opens with its founding principles. Article 1 declares that the Turkish state is a republic. Article 2 describes it as a democratic, secular and social state governed by the rule of law. Article 3 states that the state is an indivisible whole with its territory and nation, that its language is Turkish and that its capital is Ankara. Article 4 then makes the first three articles unamendable and bars any proposal to change them, so that a future majority cannot legally abolish the republic or its secular character.
Other articles that come up constantly in Turkish politics:
- Article 6 vests sovereignty "fully and unconditionally" in the nation and rules out delegating it "to any individual, group or class".
- Article 10 bans discrimination by language, race, colour, sex, political opinion, philosophical belief or religion.
- Articles 24 to 28 cover freedom of religion and conscience, of thought, of expression, of science and the arts, and of the press.
- Article 66 defines citizenship: everyone bound to the Turkish state through citizenship is a Turk.
The constitution can be amended by the assembly, but amendments that win between three-fifths and two-thirds of the votes go to a popular referendum rather than straight into force. By April 2017, 117 of the original 177 articles had been changed in 21 rounds of amendment, three of them decided entirely by referendum.
Referendums of 2007, 2010 and 2017
Three referendums since 2000 have reshaped the system, two of them by remaking the presidency and one by overhauling the courts.
21 October 2007. Under the 1982 text, parliament elected the president. In spring 2007 that process broke down when an opposition boycott denied the two-thirds quorum and the Constitutional Court annulled the first round. The governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) responded with amendments for a directly elected president, a five-year term instead of a single seven-year term, and the possibility of re-election. President Ahmet Necdet Sezer vetoed them, parliament passed them again 370 to 21, and voters approved them with about 69 percent.
12 September 2010. A package presented as bringing the constitution closer to European Union standards passed with 58 percent. It repealed Provisional Article 15, which had shielded the 1980 coup leaders from prosecution, moved trials of officers accused of plotting against the state to civilian courts, gave public employees collective bargaining rights and enlarged the judicial council.
16 April 2017. Proposed by the AKP and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and voted on under the state of emergency declared after the failed coup attempt of 15 July 2016, these 18 amendments abolished the office of prime minister, transferred full executive power to the president, raised the assembly from 550 to 600 seats and gave the president more say over judicial appointments. They passed with 51.41 percent, or 25.16 million votes to 23.78 million. The Supreme Electoral Council's decision during counting to accept ballots without the official stamp was criticised by the opposition and by observers from the OSCE and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.
The Executive Presidency at the Beştepe Complex
The new system took effect with the elections of 24 June 2018, after which the office of prime minister disappeared and the first government under the presidential system took office. Since then the president has been commander-in-chief of the military and appoints the members of the cabinet and other senior officers who run national policy. The president can veto bills, subject to a parliamentary override, and can issue presidential decrees on executive matters, though not on fundamental rights, individual rights or certain political rights; where a decree and a law conflict, the law prevails.
Erdoğan, prime minister from 2003, won the first direct presidential election on 10 August 2014 with 51.79 percent. His official residence is the Presidential Complex in Ankara's Beştepe district, inside the Atatürk Forest Farm, which he inaugurated on Republic Day, 29 October 2014. A president serves five years and may be re-elected once, with one exception: if parliament, by a three-fifths vote, calls an early election during a president's second term, the incumbent may stand a third time.
The 2023 presidential election, brought forward to 14 May, went to a runoff for the first time in Turkish history. Erdoğan took 49.5 percent in the first round, 0.5 points short of an outright win, against 44.9 percent for Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu of the Republican People's Party (CHP), the joint candidate of a six-party opposition alliance, and 5.2 percent for Sinan Oğan. On 28 May Erdoğan won the runoff with 52.2 percent.
Grand National Assembly: 600 Seats, 87 Districts, a 7 Percent Threshold
Only the assembly can enact laws and ratify treaties. Its 600 deputies are elected for five years by party-list proportional representation using the D'Hondt method in 87 electoral districts: one for each of the 81 provinces, except that Istanbul and Ankara are split into three and İzmir and Bursa into two. From 1982 a party needed 10 percent of the national vote to win any seat; in 2022 the threshold was lowered to 7 percent. The old 10 percent rule had dramatic effects: in 2002 parties representing 46.3 percent of voters were left with no seats at all. Parties with at least 20 deputies may form a parliamentary group.
At the parliamentary election of 14 May 2023, held on the same day as the presidential first round, 24 parties competed and a record seven entered the assembly. Erdoğan's People's Alliance kept its majority with 323 seats: the AKP won 268 on about 36 percent of the vote, its worst result since 2002, the MHP 50 and the New Welfare Party 5. The CHP took 169 and the Good Party 43 for the opposition alliance's 212, and the pro-Kurdish Party of Greens and the Left Future won 61. Numan Kurtulmuş of the AKP was elected speaker in June 2023.
Parliament keeps some checks on the president. A demand to investigate the president, a vice president or a minister goes to a secret ballot of the General Assembly, which can set up an investigation committee; any resulting case would be heard by the Constitutional Court sitting as the Supreme Criminal Tribunal.
Courts, Judges and the 81 Provincial Governors
Article 9 vests judicial power in independent courts. Ordinary cases end at the Court of Cassation (Yargıtay) and administrative cases at the Council of State (Danıştay). The Constitutional Court reviews laws and presidential decrees, hears individual rights applications and can ban political parties. Under Article 146 the president appoints 12 of its 15 members, mostly from lists put forward by the high courts and the Higher Education Council, and the assembly elects the other three. Since 2017 the Council of Judges and Prosecutors, which appoints and disciplines judges, has had 13 members: seven chosen by parliament, four by the president, plus the justice minister and the ministry's undersecretary.
Local government reflects the constitution's unitary design. Each of the 81 provinces is headed by a governor (vali) appointed through the Ministry of the Interior, while mayors and councils are elected. At the local elections of 31 March 2024, which chose 30 metropolitan and 1,363 district mayors, the CHP under its new leader Özgür Özel won what observers called a "spectacular upset". The full list of provinces and their capitals is in our guide to how many provinces Turkey has.
Taken together, the 1982 constitution remains the frame, but the amendments of 2007 and 2017 have rebuilt the executive inside it. A system that for most of its life worked like a parliamentary democracy with a mostly ceremonial head of state now concentrates executive authority in one elected office, balanced by a 600-seat assembly, the courts and the ballot box. For the wider picture of the country, see our Turkey country guide.