Turkey’s ruling party, known as the AKP, has pushed a set of constitutional measures through parliament that would grant the party’s leader, President Erdogan, virtually autocratic powers. The measures are set to be submitted to a national referendum in April. Michael Daventry writes:

By abolishing Turkey’s long-established system of collective cabinet government, the AKP says it will stabilize the country and streamline decision-making. But the proposed law will pool power in the hands of the president and dramatically reduce the top job’s accountability to parliament. In effect, it codifies a system of one-man rule for Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

It wipes out the century-old role of prime minister and transfers its functions to the president. It strips Turkish MPs of their duty to scrutinize the executive and abolishes the vote of confidence needed for governments to take office. It grants the presidency new powers to appoint directly a vast range of public officials—cabinet ministers, provincial governors, and judges to the highest courts in the land.

Simply put, the government’s plans . . . are designed to strengthen the individual over the collective. Powers and duties that are presently distributed among the prime minister, the cabinet, and senior judges are being rerouted to one man.

The AKP says the proposed law will equip a strong leader to generate the stability that people in Turkey crave. . . . That message has a powerful appeal for a country like Turkey, which has been rocked by political turmoil, the need to care for millions of Syrian refugees, and repeated terror attacks that have killed one person on average for each day of the last eighteen months. But it is difficult to argue the system is not being tailored specifically for Erdogan himself, not least because it eliminates the few remaining checks on his power.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.