RESEARCHTURKEY
CENTRE FOR POLICY ANALYSIS AND RESEARCH ON TURKEY – June 10, 2013
Gezi Park, located in one of the busiest
city centres of Istanbul, has become home to hundreds of thousands of
protestors for almost two weeks. Resilience of protestors in Gezi Park
coupled with increasing police violence against protestors and the Prime
Minister Erdoğan’s humiliation of the protestors sparked an
unprecedented series of protests both in other parts of Istanbul and in
more than 70 provinces of Turkey. The scope and continuity of protests
and the number of people involved in these protests have been never
before seen in the history of Turkey.
Steady economic growth throughout the
Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) period
did not go hand in hand with the enhancement of citizens’ quality of
life and the realisation of basic human rights including right to fair
trial and freedom of expression especially after the second victory of
the AKP in general elections.
In the aftermath of the AKP’s third
victory in general election of 2011, Prime Minister Erdoğan’s mandate
over the party and the AKP’s mandate over the political system of Turkey
have been consolidated. More importantly, in Gramsci’s term, it becomes
much clearer that the ‘historic bloc’ of conservative neoliberals has
been strongly established.
In this context, the AKP initiated the
preparations for the first civilian constitution of Turkey with the
promise of opening up the constitution writing process to all other
political parties in the Parliament and civil society institutions.
However, this promise has been largely unfulfilled. Conservative
neoliberal historic bloc did not allow different sections of the
opposition to influence the process in any way. In contrast, the AKP
tried to impose changing the country’s political system from a
parliamentary system to a presidential one as its initial condition upon
all other parties in the Parliament.
No comments:
Post a Comment