A return to the future

There is a question that runs through the history of modern Turkey, since the first months of the Republic wanted by Mustafa Kemal, on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, a century ago: where do this country's difficulties in protecting fundamental rights arise?
In an attempt to answer, we should highlight the discrepancies that exist not only between the protection actually guaranteed and the constitutional provisions, but also between the latter and the standards of liberal-democratic constitutionalism.

Since the origins of the Republic, civil and political rights, formally guaranteed, were in reality limited by the imposition of a rigid one-party system justified by the desire to accelerate the pace of modernization as much as possible. It is the ideological choice to "build" the new Turkish citizen starting from a peculiar militant secularism and a notion of citizenship based on the protection of state integrity from any possible territorial claims of minorities.
For a country that had to invent an identity on the model of nation states, decidedly in contrast with the universalism of trans-national and trans-cultural empires, such as the Ottoman Empire, the choice seemed in many ways obligatory, under penalty of disappearing. totally from the geographical maps, leaving the remnants of a boundless and highly strategic territory, prey to the voracious expansion policy of the European powers.
Paradoxically the greatest concern is to protect the State from the citizens, rather than considering citizens a resource for the vitality of the State.

This trend has also been renewed in the last 25 years of power of the AKP (Justice and Development Party) and, in particular of its founder and leader, Tayyip Erdoğan, even if under the guise of a populist rhetoric in which the same referendum for the direct election of the president (22 July 2007) was presented as a choice between the greater inclusion of the people in decisions about their leaders and the pursuit of the elitist vision of the CHP (the Kemalist opposition party). In reality, it was a clever ploy for a mutation of the form of government in a presidential and therefore centralizing sense, remedying the inability of Parliament to approve the 18 articles containing the modification of the fundamental Charter in a presidential sense. With 330 votes out of 550, the qualified majority of 367 votes required for the approval of the new constitutional law had not been reached. Furthermore, the president was allowed to hold party positions, thus marking the upheaval of the Turkish tradition which has always made that position the secular guarantee of impartiality.

Claudio Monge
NP May 2024