TURKEY’S Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan recently made a very strong statement. He said that the constitutional court’s decision to annul Parliament’s election of Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul as the next president because the vote was boycotted by opposition parties was a “bullet in the head of democracy.” This was a harsh indictment on the country’s highest court that many hope will not inflame the campaigning in the snap general election that Erdogan seeks for next month.
Turkey has a secular constitution. The Gul candidacy has been viewed by supporters of the constitution, most particularly the army, as a direct threat to it. The AKP has strong Islamist roots. Gul, they fear, would use his powers, albeit limited as president, to chip away at the secularist cornerstone of the constitution. Hence considerable opposition to his election, which last week saw more than a million demonstrators take to Istanbul’s streets.
Turkey’s generals, who, since the republic’s 1923 founding, have four times staged coups in carrying out what they see as their role in protecting the inheritance of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, have in recent weeks made no secret of their disapproval of an Islamist president, whether Gul or, as initially mooted, Erdogan himself.
There are, however, other principles at stake here. The AKP came to power in 2002 in an electoral landslide. Popular support was the greater because the established political parties had generally proved themselves incompetent and corrupt. More emphasis was placed on individual political careers rather than on the greater good of the country. AKP-run municipalities, not simply in Turkey’s Islamist heartland around Konya and Kayseri but in Istanbul and Ankara, demonstrated a party strong on ethics but short on disfiguring corruption. Many ordinary Turks, for whom the promised benefits of a free market economy had not arrived, decided to back the AKP. The decision was not made so much on religious as economic grounds.
And remarkably, despite dire opposition predictions to the contrary, Erdogan’s AKP administration has proved highly adept at economic management with most indicators heading in the right direction. Not only this but the government restarted Turkey’s stalled bid for EU membership. This was done in the certain knowledge that Brussels would recoil from an Islamic member state. These negotiations were led by none other than Abdullah Gul, the fluent English and Arabic speaker and would-be president.
Erdogan clearly believes that his party will win a new and perhaps even larger mandate from the electorate. If that happens, secularist opponents to a Gul presidency will have to think long and hard before resuming their campaign. If Turkey is the democracy that Atatürk wanted, then the voice of the people must be heeded. If that also means changing the constitution so for instance the president is chosen by the electorate, not Parliament, then this should also happen. No constitution is unchangeable. Turkey’s present document itself is hardly 25 years old. The key issue is that these decisions rest not with the generals nor the intellectuals nor the religious establishment nor any other pressure group, but with the voters themselves.
