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Thursday, July 05 2007 @ 07:37 AM Central Daylight Time
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Mehmet Y. Yilmaz
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been revealing in his pre-election speeches to citizens what it is that most awaits us post-elections: A political crisis!
Here is how the crisis will play out apparently: After the elections (July 22), the new Turkish Parliament will again be unable to choose a president, and again Turkey will have to go to general elections to elect a new parliament.
During that process, if the Constitutional Court rejects the demand to void the changes which would allow the people of Turkey to elect the president, the people of Turkey will then face two ballot boxes. One of them will be to elect an MP, the other to elect the president. Thus, if these constitutional changes are not approved, and assuming that the minimum quorum of 367 MPs in the Turkish Parliament for electing the president is not brought about, Turkey will head once more to the ballot boxes!
The Prime Minister sees this constitutional process as a political crisis!
But actually, there is only one reason that a crisis might emerge from this process: the fact that he is only picking the presidential candidate according to his own thoughts and feelings!
This derives from the fact that the Prime Minister does not seem to know about democratic culture of compromise, and that if he does, he certainly has not embraced it.
Is it really so hard for him to pick a candidate that everyone can agree on?
If a political party which has been in power for the past four and a half years cannot find a candidate that all of Turkey can embrace, why is the element responsible for
this the "consitutional process" and not the ruling party itself?
If the Prime Minister had only known what it was to be a politician who embraced political compromise, Turkey would today have a new president. What's more, the Prime Minister must cease to blame the constitutional order of things for the problems which actually derive from his lack of political universality.
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