Question regarding permission for acceptance of merge request

Hi

I am part of a team that is beginning to use GitLab.
We would like to enforce that all changes coming to both master, and our release branches come in through merge requests.
Therefore master and release branches are protected, and ideally should not allow developers to push directly to them.

However it has now come to my attention that users with the developer permission are not allowed to accept merge requests.
Our code review process is a collaborative effort where no one is really elevated above others. Therefore it is important that any developer can review and accept them.

tl;dr: Is there a way to both enforce that nobody pushes directly to protected branches, but also allow anyone with developer permission to accept merge requests?