The ruling party will appraise its popularity by the yardstick of the 50 million-strong electorate's Yes or No, writes Michael O'Sullivanin Istanbul
TOMORROW’S VOTE on a package of constitutional reforms for Turkey is being perceived in the country to be as much about an endorsement of the administration of prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as it is about the actual measures the people are being asked to accept or reject.
Mr Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) has been in power for eight years and, with parliamentary elections due next year, he is seeking a decisive Yes vote as an indication of the people’s willingness to endorse his party’s continuation in government.
On offer to some 50 million Turkish citizens entitled to vote is a raft of measures which the government claims will limit the power of the military while at the same time granting parliament greater control over the appointment of the judges of the constitutional court.
All-party consensus on the need for constitutional reform is rooted in the fact that Turkey’s present constitution was passed into law under the military government which took power on September 12th, 1980. Therefore the date chosen by the government for this referendum, the 30th anniversary of the military coup, has been used as a rallying cry to remind voters of the bad old days of military repression.
While the opposition accepts this, they are unhappy about some of the proposals which would, they claim, compromise judicial independence.
“What is needed in Turkey now” says Mehmet Pishkin, a 32-year-old computer software analyst living in Istanbul, “is not ad hoc constitutional reform, but a totally new constitution which would reflect the needs of 21st-century Turkey”.
When pressed to say what that document might contain, he says that “it should consist of the best of the old Kemalist secular tradition, the best of the old Ottoman tradition and a totally new script for the 21st century”.
The long shadow cast by Turkey’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, is always at the heart of any discussion on constitutional reform in Turkey.
The keepers of the Kemalist flame accuse the AKP of constantly eroding the core traditions of the secular state founded by Ataturk in 1923.
These divisions have manifested themselves in various forms including supporters of secularism rallying in Ankara in 2007 in an attempt to put pressure on Mr Erdogan not to run in presidential elections because of what they saw as his traditional Islamic background. There have also been widespread protests on the issue of women wearing the headscarf.
The bitterness and interparty mud-slinging so much in evidence during this referendum campaign has reflected the deep divisions between the more Islamist AKP and the secularist views of the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP).
The government has been accused of holding the plebiscite at the height of the summer holiday period when the old Kemalist elite are out of the country on vacation and also of arranging extra return flights to Turkey from Mecca so that its supporters making the Hajj can return in time to vote.
Supporters of a No vote claim that if the referendum had been held in October it would have guaranteed a larger turnout of No voters.
The government was keen to avoid a situation which would see a constitutional referendum being viewed as a pre-parliamentary election test.
The reform package was passed by parliament by the end of May by a vote below the two-thirds majority necessary to pass it directly into law.
However, the vote was sufficient for the proposed changes to be put to a referendum.
The vote is expected to divide along party lines similar to the outcome of the last general election. The biggest support for the Yes campaign is likely to come from conservative rural areas, while the No campaign can expect its biggest support base to be in large population centres such as Istanbul. There has been criticism of the government’s inability to explain clearly to the voters what exactly is at issue in this referendum.
There is a view in Turkey that the young educated class are becoming increasingly apolitical and that this apathy will be reflected in the referendum turnout.
If that is the case, it would give credence to opinion polls that point to the government carrying the day with a slim majority despite indications of some erosion in its support over the last few days.
MAIN POINTS REFORM IN TURKEY
The referendum proposes:
To make the military more accountable to civilian courts.
To give parliament more power over the appointment of judges.
To grant civil servants the right to conclude collective agreements and to go on strike.
To lift immunity from prosecution for the leaders of the 1980 military coup.