Home > 6.2 Coalitions > TÜRKIYE - Opinion on the Amendments to the Constituion Adopted by the Grand National Assembly on 21 January 2017 and to be Submitted to a National Referendum on 16 April 2017
 
 
 
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Paragraph 56
 

As a rule, the President may serve only two five-year terms (Article 101), which already allows for a quite long ten-year total mandate. However, in case new elections have been decided by the Grand National Assembly during the second term of the President, he/she can run for the presidency once more (Article 116, see below). This would de facto give the President a third term, thus extending the total length of his or her mandate much longer than the original ten years. It cannot be excluded from the letter of Articles 101 and 116 that a further renewal of elections would not have the same effect, as the Turkish authorities argue. In such a case, the President could stay in office for a potentially unlimited period of time, which is clearly unacceptable. As Linz notes, in a presidential system, “the power of the President is at once so concentrated and so extensive that it seems unsafe not to check it by limiting the number of times any one President can be elected”.