Turkey In Crisis. How Will The People React?
Excerpts from Newsweek article on Turkey (click for full article):
Turkey’s Constitutional Court recently overruled its National Assembly and declared that two constitutional amendments passed in February were in fact unconstitutional. The Assembly is entitled to amend the Constitution with a 65 percent majority, and the judges conceded that I’s had been dotted and T’s crossed. They just disliked the amendments’ content. In the next three months, the court will also decide whether Turkey’s AK Party government, duly re-elected with an overwhelming majority last July, shall continue to govern. If they decide no, they will dissolve the AK Party and ban its leaders, the prime minister and president included, from politics. The situation is now the very definition of a constitutional crisis, and anyone who thinks Turkey’s future important should worry.
The court’s recent action is legally bizarre and arguably unconstitutional itself….
The real issue is whether those who voted to approve the Constitution in 1982 had any moral right to impose unamendable clauses on their descendants. Few true democrats would think so. It is one thing to make amending a constitution hard, quite another to render it impossible. Remember, too, that the plebiscite approving today’s Constitution was conducted under military tutelage. There is little doubt that today’s judges reflect the original, controlling intent of 1982’s generals…. [JW: see my comment below]
Almost certainly there will be new elections, and they will vote for a successor party, which is permissible under Turkish law. Legally, too, a banned Erdogan can run as an independent and even remain prime minister….
Sooner or later the two real powers in the land—the generals and the people—will speak. The generals have made it clear they side with the court. After all, they have crushed four governments since 1960 and this would merely be a fifth. On previous occasions a majority of Turks would probably have backed military intervention, had they been asked. Today polls say a clear majority is opposed. This makes the present political situation unprecedented.
Nor could the generals necessarily rely on the Army. In 2003 and 2004 some senior four-star generals planned a coup, but the idea apparently found little support among their juniors…
[JW: note the following excerpt from a Today’s Zaman article about a week ago: The [opposition] CHP claims that the current Parliament does not hold the authority to make comprehensive changes to the Constitution and that a new constitution can only be written by a founding Parliament. CHP leader Deniz Baykal had earlier said that such a constitution could only be written after the end of a coup period or a war for independence.]
Re: “The real issue is whether those who voted to approve the Constitution in 1982 had any moral right to impose unamendable clauses on their descendants. Few true democrats would think so.”
No, it isn’t. Nobody from the AKP-MHP camp (which passed the amendments) claim that they were amending the unamendables! AKP defense with the Court relies on that point (we didn’t violate the unamendable articles), too. So, this author’s true democrats must be indulding in irrelevance.
Re: “two real powers in the land—the generals and the people”
What nonsense! Like what the generals happen to ultimately say (secular, unitary state) has no support amongst the people! Like the generals are the only autocrats of the land!