Turkey's Constitutional Crisis Deepens

Turkey's Constitutional Crisis continued to build April 30, as the government, which is dominated by the moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party, resisted efforts by the country's military leadership to influence the outcome of the presidential election. The outcome of the crisis stands to have profound influence over the country's political and social developments in the coming years, as well as over Ankara's European Union membership bid.

Turkey's generals, along with opposition political leaders, are justifying actions to disrupt the presidential election process by insisting that they are defending the Turkish Republic's tradition of secularism. Justice and Development Party (AKP) officials, led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, charge that the military's behavior is out of line with Turkey's democratic system. Meanwhile, the AKP's candidate for president, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, says he will not be intimidated into abandoning his candidacy.

In an address broadcast April 30, Erdogan called for national unity. “We can overcome many problems so long as we treat each other with love," the prime minister said. In the speech, which was recorded April 28, Erdogan avoided making a direct attack on the military’s statement. He instead played up the fact that Turkey’s economy has performed well under the AKP’s stewardship. “We must protect this atmosphere of stability and tranquillity," he said.

The confrontation between the AKP and its opponents began April 27, when opposition MPs boycotted the first round of presidential voting, and filed a suit in the Turkish Constitutional Court to invalidate the presidential vote. The boycott prevented Gul from being elected president. The court is expected to rule on the opposition suit before the next scheduled found of voting on May 2. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive].

Later on April 27, the Turkish military reasserted itself, issuing a statement that questioned the AKP's commitment to secularism. On April 29, opponents kept the pressure on the AKP, mounting a mass rally in Istanbul in defense of the secularist tradition. The same day, the Cumhuriyet newspaper published a story purportedly quoting Gul, the AKP presidential candidate, as saying, "we want to change the secular system in Turkey." In a written statement distributed April 30, Gul vigorously denied saying such a thing.

The Constitutional Court began considering the case on April 30. If the judges dismiss the opposition suit, Gul would be virtually assured of election, given the AKP's large majority in the legislature. A ruling against the AKP, on the other hand, would throw Turkey's political process into extended turmoil, and possibly sink the country's chances of joining the EU for the foreseeable future.

Turkey's markets reacted strongly to the political uncertainty, with the country's currency, the lira, weakening, and the Istanbul stock market losing roughly 4 percent of its total value of stocks during April 30's trading session. EU officials on April 30 castigated the Turkish military for meddling in politics, and emphasized that Brussels would scrutinize the Constitutional Court's ruling.

"This is a clear test case whether the Turkish armed forces respect democratic secularization and democratic values," Olli Rehn, the EU expansion affairs commissioner, told reporters in Brussels.

"It is important that the military leave the remit of democracy to the democratically elected government," Rehn said, stressing that respect for democratic values "is at the core" of efforts to bring Turkey into the EU.

Though often described as a figurehead, the Turkish president is much more than that. The Turkish constitution, drafted two years after a 1980 military coup, gives the president the power to appoint judges and university rectors and to veto legislation and the appointment of government officials.

In many ways, as envisioned by the 1982 constitution, the presidency serves as a kind of defender position for Turkey's secular system. The military, seen as the ultimate guardian of Turkey's secular system, had previously hinted at its discomfort with the idea of an AKP member as president, but its April 27 midnight communiqué made its stance significantly clearer.

"It should not be forgotten that the Turkish armed forces is one of the sides in this debate and the absolute defender of secularism," said the military, which has previously ousted four different governments, most recently in 1997, when it engineered the resignation of the Islamist Welfare Party. "When necessary, they will display its stance and attitudes very clearly. No one should doubt that."

The statement, which went on to list specific cases in which the military believed the AKP was upsetting the balance between religion and state, sent a jolt through Turkish society. "There isn't the slightest doubt that this is a military intervention," political analyst Cengiz Candar wrote in the English-language Turkish Daily News.

But the military's move was part of a broader effort to reassert its position in Turkish political life, many observers here believe.

In recent years, as Turkey pursued its long-held goal of joining the EU, the military lowered its profile in the country's public affairs and quietly acquiesced to EU-mandated reforms that increased civilian oversight of the armed forces. Though clearly uncomfortable with many of the EU-related reforms, the military mostly kept quiet. The approach of the presidential election, and the possibility of a religious-minded politician winning it, appears to have forced Turkey's generals to break their self-imposed silence.

On April 12, Turkey's hard-line chief of staff, Gen. Yasar Buyukanit, gave a rare and dramatic press conference in which he said the military expects the next president to respect secularism "not just in words, but also in deeds." The general also said the Turkish military was prepared to invade northern Iraq in pursuit of guerillas belonging to the Kurdish separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), but that it was waiting for the civilian government to approve any cross-border operation.

A few days after the press conference, police in Istanbul raided the offices of Nokta, a newsmagazine that had recently published a number of hard-hitting investigative pieces about the military, including one that claimed to have uncovered a military plan to overthrow the AKP government in 2004, and another that claimed the General Staff was funding several Turkish non-governmental organizations.

Soon after the raid, Nokta's owner announced that the magazine would cease publication. "I was desperate, I am exhausted. I can't take all this slander and I have taken the decision to close Nokta," Ayhan Durgun, the publication's owner, said in a statement.

Riza Kucukoglu, a retired general who is currently an advisor at Center for Eurasian Strategic Studies, an Ankara-based think tank that has close links to Turkey's military establishment, says the general staff's April 27 statement was the culmination of a long-simmering frustration.

"The military said,