Isil Kurnaz*
The question posed by Schmoll and Ting in their recent study, which aims to ask the right questions about legislative violence, is roughly this: Why do some parliaments see members resort to physical violence while others do not? Moreover, according to the authors, brawls in parliament are not only a sharp departure from democratic norms but also influence voter perceptions, signaling conflict and democratic backsliding. But is this the case everywhere? Specifically in Turkey, should these fistfights in Parliament be seen as a harbinger of democratic regression, or are they a symptom of the ongoing process of constitutional erosion, depending on the context in which this violence occurs? Is throwing a punch in response to words, spilling blood in response to language, a cause or a result of democratic decline?
On Friday, August 16, the Turkish Grand National Assembly convened in an extraordinary session upon the motion of 150 members of parliament. Let me note right away that this extraordinary session was not convened at the initiative of the Speaker of the Assembly, as suggested by the ruling party, but was a legal obligation due to the justified motion submitted by the required number of MPs, according to Article 7, Paragraph 2 of the Parliamentary Rules of Procedure.
The topic of the session was the implementation of the Constitutional Court’s decision, published in the Official Gazette on August 1, stating that the action regarding the dismissal of Can Atalay’s parliamentary status was null and void. I’m aware that the sentence is technically complex, so let me summarize it: According to the Court, the dismissal of Can Atalay’s parliamentary status had created a de facto situation, and the Constitutional Court could not rule on this de facto situation. In essence, what the Court was saying was that Atalay’s parliamentary status continued, and since there was no decision to lift his immunity, his immunity also continued.
During this session, convened to implement the Constitutional Court’s decision, another MP physically attacked Ahmet Şık while he was speaking at the podium, provoked by Şık’s words. Interestingly, Ahmet Şık was given a censure penalty under Article 160/1/3 of the Rules of Procedure for his words. The MP who punched him was given the same censure penalty under Article 160/1/5 for his physical actions. The Assembly’s response equated throwing a punch with speaking words, as if words and actions, action and potential, were the same thing.
Here we encounter another vicious circle of law. According to the Constitutional Court, both Can Atalay and Alpay Özalan, the MP who threw the punch, have the same parliamentary status and immunity. However, the de facto situation we are experiencing means that while Atalay remains in prison despite his immunity, Özalan enjoys immunity despite his punches. Furthermore, the arbitrariness and disproportion in these censure decisions are also immune to oversight because no institution, including the Constitutional Court, has the authority to review such decisions by the parliament.
This type of violence has a technical term: legislative violence. Connecting to the question I posed earlier, legislative violence refers to acts of physical violence that occur within the legislative body, among its members, and within its premises. A comprehensive and recent study from 2024, which seeks to understand the individual logic behind legislative violence in countries like Turkey, Taiwan, Ukraine, and South Korea, has been titled: “Making Punches Count: The Individual Logic of Legislative Brawls.”
The conclusion they reached is interesting. According to the authors, the individual logic behind such acts of violence is not just rooted in the violent tendencies of the individual MP. One of the authors, political scientist Nathan Batto, says that the fundamental paradox of legislative violence is that those who engage in it are trying to win a democratic game using non-democratic means.
But Batto also says something else that is interesting: These acts of violence cannot be considered outside of politics as just an impulsive outburst of individual anger. When politicians resort to violence at the legislative podium, they do so as part of a calculated strategy: “They are trying to send a message to a specific target audience about who they are and what kind of person they are.”
According to the authors, the target audience of these actions is never the general electorate but rather partisan voters. Because, according to their research, these MPs want to send this message to partisan voters: “You are sending a reliable message that you are a good partisan soldier, that you will fight for the party’s positions, and that you are ready to pay a price.” These positions can be any positions.
The study interviewed MPs who were frequently involved in physical altercations in their parliaments and found that these MPs described their involvement in acts of violence as strategic moves to gain influence within their parties.
Another interesting set of questions comes from a 2023 study that seeks to quantitatively explain legislative violence through an empirical database. This study claims that legislative violence first began in 1856, before the American Civil War, when American Senator Charles Sumner was almost killed by a group of pro-slavery representatives during a slavery debate. Another example comes from the United Kingdom. In 1920, during the Irish War of Independence, Joseph Devlin, an Irish nationalist member of the UK House of Commons, was attacked by Conservative MP John Elsdale Molson over the conduct of British troops in Ireland. This attack occurred despite MPs sitting “two sword lengths apart” in Westminster. Moreover, the architectural feature of measuring MPs’ seats with two sword lengths was symbolically intended to emphasize the necessity of resolving conflicts through peaceful means.
The same study includes instances of legislative violence during the AKP years in Turkey. According to the authors, when AKP MPs attacked an opposition MP simply because he made a speech criticizing the president, it may be a sign that the democratic “rules of the game” are no longer widely accepted. All this literature tells us that legislative violence is performative and tactical.
But Gandrud’s analysis is more fruitful in placing the legislative violence that occurred in Turkey last week into a broader context. According to Gandrud, legislative violence is most often seen when the group that also holds the majority in parliament struggles to credibly commit to peaceful negotiation and legal resolution.
In other words, political powers resort to legislative violence when they find it difficult to manage situations they cannot explain legally and democratically to the public, to maneuver out of those situations with another strategy and tactic, and to explain why they cannot resolve issues through democratic and peaceful methods. In Turkey, while the dismissal of Can Atalay’s parliamentary status, which has become a crisis between the legislature, executive, and judiciary, cannot be explained to the democratic public, the correlation between the subsequent legislative violence and Devlet Bahçeli’s call to “close the Constitutional Court” is not difficult to see.
Moreover, Bahçeli did not stop at calling for the closure of the Constitutional Court; he also said that the limits of legislative irresponsibility should be redrawn. Tolga Şirin’s article on legislative irresponsibility, “Is the Voice of the Assembly the Voice of the Nation? The Erosion of Legislative Irresponsibility,” offers an important perspective in explaining the gap between de facto and legal situations. In Turkey, legislative irresponsibility protects MPs from criminal prosecution but creates a disproportion between words and actions and does not provide a guarantee against legal claims. With the vague and unchecked provisions of the Rules of Procedure, the words spoken at the podium and the punches thrown there are made equal.
U.S. Congressman Galusha A. Grow described the precursors of legislative violence as early as 1900:
“On a hot afternoon or evening, gather hundreds of men together; fill them with partisan fire; confuse their minds about the personal gain or loss they will achieve with the vote they will cast on the question at hand, and instill jealousy and malice against others, and you have ample material for a fight. All you need is an excuse, and that is often easy to find.”
This whole narrative shows the connection between legislative violence and the state of the legislature. The effort of a political majority to undermine the principles of credibility and accountability through legislative violence, in order to overcome de facto situations that cannot be democratically legitimized, ultimately manifests itself in this way. At the other end of the spectrum is the fact that the most democratic parliaments, with the highest reliability in solving problems and making contentious decisions, are the most democratic. On the other hand, there is a political mediocrity that avoids the ground of democratic and legal debate, and shows another arena as the place to solve problems instead of the Assembly. This political mediocrity determines the mode of legislative violence in Turkey.
Schmoll, M., & Ting, W. L. (2023). Explaining physical violence in parliaments. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 67(2-3), 375-401. https://doi.org/10.1177/00220027221115352
Batto, N. F., & Beaulieu, E. (2024). Making punches count: The individual logic of legislative brawls. Oxford University Press.
Taiwan News. (2023, April 14). Making punches count’ looks at legislative fights in Taiwan and abroad. https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/news/5894211
Gandrud, C. (2016). Two sword lengths apart: Credible commitment problems and physical violence in democratic national legislatures. Journal of Peace Research, 53(1), 130-145. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343315604707
Şirin, T. (2023). “Meclisin Sesi Ulusun Sesi” mi? Erozyona uğrayan yasama sorumsuzluğu. Anayasa Yargısı, 40(1), 61-104.
Orcan, N. U. (2020). Yarış(a)mayan ilkeler: Türkiye Anayasa Mahkemesinin politik ifadeler bağlamında adil denge sorunu. Anayasa Hukuku Dergisi, 9(18), 465-532.
Küçük, T. S. (2019). Anayasa hukukundaki çağdaş eğilimler ışığında parlamenter dokunulmazlıklar. Legal Yayınları.
The Saturday Evening Post. (1900). The last days of the duello in Congress. The Saturday Evening Post, 172(2), 1194.
*Isil Kurnaz graduated with honors from Bilkent University Faculty of Law. She obtained a master’s degree in International Human Rights Law from Lund University with the Sweden Institute Human Rights Scholarship in memory of Anna Lindh, awarded by the Swedish government. She won the Halit Çelenk Law Award in 2018 for her thesis on “Collective Social Rights in Constitutions.” She is currently working as a doctoral researcher with a scholarship at the Human Rights Institute of Sant’Anna Scuola Universitaria Superiore Pisa in Italy. She also contributes regularly to the Birikim magazine.
This article initially was published in Birikim Magazine and translated into English by Politurco.
