The Turkish Parliament in Ankara in May 2012, when it began work on a new constitution. Source: ADEM ALTAN/AFP/GettyImages[/caption]
Referring to the generals who deposed him twice, former Turkish Prime Minister Süleyman Demirel once said that the trouble with Turkish politics was that while “politicians hold the drum, somebody else holds the sticks.”
As prospects fade for a new constitution to replace the one the military introduced after booting out Demirel for the second time in 1980, it is tempting to rephrase him: the trouble with Turkish politics is that when politicians get ahold of the sticks, they bang the drum so hard that they break it.
A draconian document intended to restore order after a decade of political instability, the 1982 constitution has few overt supporters in Turkey, and the Justice and Development Party (JDP) government has talked about radically rewriting it ever since it came to power in 2002. In 2007, the JDP commissioned a group of (mostly liberal) constitutional experts to draft a new constitution, but their deliberations were forgotten when the government made a clumsy attempt to lift university headscarf bans and prosecutors opened an equally clumsy closure case against it.
The JDP tried again in 2010, casting a referendum to change twenty-seven articles of the constitution as an exorcism of historical demons. “No country has ever managed to join the European Union with a coup constitution,” said the party’s EU minister, Egemen Bağış. “This is a historic turning point,” he added. Critics called the referendum, which the JDP won, a ploy to tighten the government’s grip on state institutions.
In the run up to national elections in 2011, with the military put firmly in its place, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced that his priority during his third term would be to draft a new constitution. From the start, the rules guiding the operation of the parliamentary committee set up to lead the work appeared problematic. The decision to have equal representation for each of the four parties in Parliament on the Constitutional Reconciliation Commission was in line with the government’s stated intention to create a consensus-based charter. What concerned observers, however, was that unanimity was required for all decisions.
“What common ground are you going to find between a Turkish nationalist party that defends the centralized status quo and a Kurdish nationalist party calling for devolution?” asks Fazıl Hüsnü Erdem, a constitutional expert who was a member of the 2007 constitutional commission. The chairman of that 2007 commission, Ergun Özbudun, bluntly described the new process as “still-born.”
Not even Cemil Çiçek, parliamentary speaker and chairman of the Reconciliation Commission, appeared to have high hopes: “You can’t write a constitution with clenched fists,” he said, referring to the deeply polarized political atmosphere in Turkey since the 2011 elections. The Commission was supposed to complete its work by the end of 2012. In the nine months after deliberations began in last April members had managed to agree on fewer than twenty articles out of fifty in the first, less controversial, part of the constitution, which deals with fundamental rights and freedoms.
Last week, party leaders agreed to extend the Commission’s remit for three months, but its work has been completely overshadowed by a debate surrounding the prime minister’s political future. In line with legislation, Erdoğan has made it clear that he will not be presenting himself for a fourth term in 2014. But as he put it at the JDP’s party congress in September 2012, “That doesn’t mean I’ll be saying goodbye.”
The question was how exactly he planned to hold onto his political dominance. For well over a year now, there has been talk of him swapping places with President Abdullah Gül, a fellow JDP founding member, in a Turkish version of the Putin–Medvedev swap in Moscow. On paper, Turkey’s president is supposed to be above politics, but Erdoğan would not be the first politician to control a party from the presidential palace. Turgut Özal ensured he could do the same after 1989 by getting one of his least charismatic lieutenants to stand as prime minister. Abdullah Gül is not Yıldırım Akbulut, however. Nor is Erdoğan ever likely to be satisfied with the severely circumscribed powers Turkish presidents have under the current parliamentary system.
In May 2012, his legal-minded lieutenants went to work. “Let’s just bring in a presidential system,” said Burhan Kuzu, chairman of the parliamentary constitutional committee, “this parliamentary system is the putrescent English system.” On 8 May last year, a day before the Reconciliation Commission went back to work, Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdağ stated that “of all the systems that exist, the system that permits the best control is the presidential system."
It became clear exactly what Bozdağ meant by permitting better “control” when the JDP presented its own constitutional draft a month ago. Erdoğan’s party wants a strong presidential system, like the US one but with crucial differences. While the US is federal, the JDP intends to hold on to Turkey’s highly centralized political structure, where the government appoints district governors and political party lists are the sole creation of party leaders. The US has a bi-cameral system; the JDP foresees maintaining the current single house.
But that is not all. Under the JDP draft, the president would be able to issue decrees without parliamentary approval, he would be able to dissolve parliament, and he would have sole responsibility for appointing all ministers and senior bureaucrats. “Yes, it’s true that the US president doesn’t have such sweeping powers to issue decrees,” Kuzu told journalists, “but Obama cries day and night, begs his parliament. He struggled to get his health reforms through. He can only push through three-month budgets . . . We are proposing our model as a solution to the bottlenecks in the US system.”
As the small left-wing daily Birgun impishly pointed out, the JDP solution looks strikingly similar to the system in Jordan, a monarchy described as “authoritarian” by the Economic Intelligence Unit (EIU) and ranked 118th out 167 countries on its World Democracy Index. Turkey, described as “mixed,” is currently ranked 88th.
Accused of autocratic dreams, Erdoğan struck back in characteristic fashion. “You know there’s this thing they call [separation of] powers,” he told supporters at a rally in the city of Konya in mid-December. “It’s always being stuck up as an obstacle in front of you.” Yet it seems almost certain that he has overstretched himself this time. Nobody now believes the Constitutional Reconciliation Commission will complete its work in three months. Opinion polls suggest public opinion is against a radical change to the country’s political system.
Erdoğan’s proposals have stirred up tensions inside his own party, too. Several ministers have spoken out against a presidential system. For some months now, apparently limbering up for the 2014 presidential election campaign, President Gül has been treading an increasingly independent line on issues like Turkey’s EU accession process and freedom of expression.
Since the New Year, Erdoğan himself appears to have transferred his attention back to the Kurdish issue, where a peace process that had gathered steam after 2005 faded away in 2009. Following official acknowledgement that senior Turkish officials are again in talks with the imprisoned leader of the formerly separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), Abdullah Öcalan, many in the Turkish media seem to think the Kurdish issue will have been resolved by the end of the year. It may just be possible to end a war that has killed more than thirty thousand people since 1984, but the trouble is that without changing a constitution that mentions “Turkishness” more than fifty times, a longer-lasting solution seems impossible.
