Plan B: Early Elections
From the article (click here for full text):
The AK Party plans to amend two articles of the Constitution that regulate the laws on political party closures and to seek the support of political parties represented in Parliament for these amendments. But, it has serious doubts that the amendments will find the quorum necessary to pass through Parliament. In other words, there is little chance that it will be able to avoid closure. As a last chance, it is considering to call snap polls in the autumn in which the Turkish nation will face six ballot boxes: one for general elections, one for a referendum on the planned constitutional amendments and four for local elections in which mayors, city council members, provincial council members and mukhtars, or neighborhood heads, will separately be elected.
A closure case was filed last month against the AK Party, which garnered 47 percent of the nationwide vote in last year’s general elections, by the chief prosecutor of the Supreme Court of Appeals on the grounds that it has become a focal point of “anti-secular activities,” a charge strongly denied by the party. The prosecutor also seeks to ban 70 of its high-level officials from engaging in politics for five years, including Prime Minister Erdogan, in addition to also banning President Abdullah Gül (a former AK Party member).
JW: Click here for a discussion of AKP’s defense, which it submitted to the court. In it AKP claims to be secular but, according to observers, under a broader definition of secularism than that used in the indictment.
Hmm. It might be worth noting at this point that the AKP has some weird definition for the kind of secularism they are after. The PM sometimes says it and our AKP-loving educated classes parrot it often enough. It is an analogy to geometry and says that the state should be equidistant to all kinds of faith. I don’t know what it means, and I’d advise, for the non-mathematically inclined, to try it on a piece of paper for two dimensions with four randomly-placed points and a fifth one to be made equidistant to the others.
If this sounds like a joke, let me assure you that it isn’t. Had the Western press not been concentrating on badmouthing the nationalist authoritarian etc. secular elite here, I could probably find a better source in English. But here it is from a translated speech by RTE at the AEI:
“This supposition is also the most effective measure against those who try to abuse people’s spiritual and moral feelings, including religion as for secularism [sic]. We define this as an institutional attitude and method which ensures the state to remain impartial and equidistant to all religions and thoughts, a principle which aims to ensure peaceful social coexistence between different creeds, sects, and schools of thought.”
This might sound OK at first blush, but it is devoid of meaningful content. It fails as a criterion because it implies a state apparatus that jumps all over the place as its citizens warm up to a variety of faiths. Sometimes no amount of jumping around will satisfy the distance constraint. It also fails the sanity test, as clearly we do not want impartiality towards all religions since some will interfere with legitimate secular purposes.
Under this conception it appears that a ‘legitimate secular purpose’ would be treated as just another faith-based one. I notice that the local peddlers of corrupt version of US-style secularism usually skip the “legitimate secular purpose” language (see the Lemon test). The key here is, of course, that secular purposes do trump religious faith under meaningful approaches to secularism. That is, for example, the state will use force, if necessary, to accomplish an even distribution of an estate among the inheritors regardless of their sex, and will not treat a female witness any differently than a male one in a court of law. Thus, it cannot remain ‘impartial and equidistant’ to even just two religions if one is fine with gender-equality and the other isn’t.
Now, none of this has any direct bearing on the closure case. If we were to shut down political parties any time their leaders mumbled nonsense we’d need to shut down all. That said, I find it annoying — and some find it telling — that the Western press and the local English-speaking sycophants of the AKP never seem to mention or even notice this oddity and instead pretend that any question concerning the AKP’s committment to secularism must simply be manufactured out of spite.