—Tolga Şirin, Associate Professor of Constitutional Law, Marmara University, Turkey. Turkey’s new ‘presidentialism alla Turca’ has almost completed its fourth and a half years. The constitutional amendment supporters in the 2017 referendum claimed that the new system would stabilize and strengthen the country and bring a breakthrough in the economic and legal fields. These claims did
The Return of Lula in Brazil: New Challenges for Comparative Presidential Studies
—Juliano Zaiden Benvindo, University of Brasília and National Council for Scientific and Technological Development [Editors’ Note: This is one of our biweekly ICONnect columns. For more information on our four columnists for 2021, please see here.] A recent column published in The Economist titled ”The Problem of Latin America’s Proxy Presidents” raises the argument that,
Beyond Term Limits: Restraining Chief Executives in Africa
—Berihun Adugna Gebeye, Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg [Editors’ Note: This is one of our biweekly ICONnect columns. For more information on our four columnists for 2021, please see here.] On 8 March 2021, the Mo Ibrahim Foundation announced that President Mahamadou Issoufou of Niger
Ecuador’s “Unstoppable” Constitutional Referendum
—Mauricio Guim, S.J.D. candidate and Presidential Fellow in Data Science, University of Virginia School of Law & Augusto Verduga, LL.M. candidate, Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Quito, Ecuador[1] Soon after winning the presidential election, new President Lenin Moreno announced a referendum to amend Ecuador’s Constitution. The proposal is the centerpiece of a so-far successful scheme to
How the Bolivian Constitutional Court Helped the Morales Regime to Break the Political Insurance of the Bolivian Constitution
—Sergio Verdugo, Professor, Universidad del Desarrollo (Chile); JSD candidate, New York University* In a 2016 referendum, a majority of Bolivians stopped President Evo Morales from running for a fourth Presidential term by rejecting a constitutional reform aimed at eliminating the constitutional limits on reelection. The failed bill establishing the constitutional modification resembled what David Landau
A Constitutional Crisis in a Land Without a Constitution: Presidential Terms and Iraqi Kurdistan
–Matthew Schweitzer, University of Chicago Iraq’s Kurds have long struggled to control their destiny. Since the 2003 US-led invasion, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has enjoyed stability, security, and prosperity — in 2014 the region boasted the world’s second-fastest growing economy. This unprecedented economic boom helped create conditions for a more pluralistic and free society
