“In general, one of the supreme goals of Turkey’s ruling party in recent years is the implementation of the constitutional amendments,” – said Turkologist Ruben Melkonyan in an interview with Aravot.am. He considers that the new Constitution has several target goals and is somewhere personified around the image of Erdoğan because according to this Constitution, conceptual and structural changes will take place in Turkey regarding the country’s governance and the parliamentary system will become presidential, “Incidentally, the institute of the president will become stronger and will bear in itself some elements typical of a cult, in particular, one Article (Article 299) is included and activated in the Criminal Code of Turkey that any person who publicly denigrates Turkishness, the Republic or the Grand National Assembly of Turkey shall be sentenced to 6 months to 3 years of imprisonment.
To the point, now, several journalists in Turkey are convicted under this Article and one of them is already serving his sentence in prison. In addition, therewith, a second indisputable image is created in Turkey, if until now it was Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, now, it will be Erdoğan. This constitution is Erdoğan Constitution, which also refers to another important phenomenon of Turkey and it is the secularism. Since the Republic of Turkey was created as a secular state, and the religious institutions and pro-religious figures were kept away from the politic while now, on the contrary, Erdoğan is a pro-religious leader and is going to implement reforms and thus also will give greater legitimacy to religious institutions and religious figures. And the new image of Turkey will already be more Islamic while Turkey’s current republic considers secularism as one of its pillars, in other words, the non-Islamic nature.”
Ruben Melkonyan considers that Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, ex officio, has to implement these reforms but it is a not desirable development for any prime minister as these changes will limit the powers of the prime minister, “Davutoglu’s efforts, certainly, contain fabrication because no politician, so to speak, can get to self-destruction by cutting the branch on which he is sitting while the advocate of the Constitution limiting the powers of the prime minister is the same prime minister of Turkey. This speaks of the fact that President Erdoğan’s ‘s authoritarian obsession is extended over the entire political machine and this political machine serves the ambitions of one person.”
According to the Turkologist, the Turkish opposition will try to do some actions but they will fail, “The opposition can maximum disallow the approval of the constitutional amendments in the parliament. Because it requires a fairly large number of votes of the deputies (367 votes) while the ruling party has 338 deputies, I think. In other words, the maximum that the opposition can do is not to give 30 votes to the ruling party draft and fail its passing in the parliament. But here, the other possibility arises, the ruling party brings this issue to a vote and they decide to bring it to the nation-wide referendum. This means that there are two ways: either by the parliament or hold a national referendum.
Read also
The ruling party will choose the second way because, as I said, the opposition would do everything to impede its passing at the parliament. Apart from this, the opposition has no real chances, the maximum that it should do during the national referendum is the propaganda, moreover, based on the cult of personality because this is done for Erdoğan. But if we consider that in the presidential elections in 2014, when for the first time in the history, the people elected the president and during these elections, Erdoğan received more than 50% of the votes, it speaks to the fact that Erdoğan gets more than 50 percent votes, then Erdoğan’s Constitution has the chances to collect that much votes. And the consolidation of the opposition just has to add the ‘against’ votes but is unlikely to have any decisive impact.”
Ami CHICHAKYAN
