THE US and the European Union welcomed the result of Sunday’s constitutional referendum in Turkey. The reform package that would make the country more democratic was approved by 58 per cent of the voters, in what was another resounding political victory for Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Pollsters had been predicting a very close result in the run-up, but in the end the ‘yes-vote’ won by a respectable margin. There was a paradox in that support for the reforms that bring Turkey more in line with the EU was much stronger in the cities of Anatolia; opposition to the reforms was strongest in the Europeanised cities of Marmara which include Isanbul.
The opposition Republican People’s Party and westernised Turks viewed the constitutional reform as a ‘back-door Islamist coup’, as it would allow Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) to bring the judiciary under its control. The judiciary had always been considered a bulwark against Islamisation and had clashed with the government on several occasions since 2002 when the AKP came to power.
In fact the constitutional reform package was prepared after a dispute between pro- and anti- government state prosecutors in February. The Higher Council, one of the two top judicial bodies, which appoints judges and prosecutors, stripped a pro-government prosecutor of his authority, prompting the government to speed up the constitutional reform package.
With the changes, the membership of the two top judicial bodies – Constitutional Court and the Higher Council – will be enlarged, the government now being able to appoint its own people. Erdogan’s objective was to seize control of the secular judiciary, argued the opposition and it had a point. The constitutional reforms were aimed at curtailing the powers of Turkey’s secular establishment – the military, the judiciary and the civil service – which were incompatible with democratic society.
This was why the result of the referendum was welcomed by the US and EU. The authoritarian constitution of 1982, drafted by the military after the coup of 1980 could not have been left in place in a country that wants to join the EU. Many Turks however, objected to the way all the constitutional reforms were included in a single package. Bringing the military under the control of the government and safeguarding union rights enjoyed broad support, but there was strong opposition to the reforms of the judiciary.
The package of reforms fuelled suspicions that Erdogan had a secret, Islamic agenda, but the fact is that it was democratically approved by the majority of Turks. The result of the referendum was also a vote of confidence in the AKP and Erdogan who must now view next year’s parliamentary elections with great optimism.
