Erdogan pressured to build consensus

ISTANBUL // Turks yesterday welcomed the decision by the country’s Constitutional Court not to shut down the ruling party, but Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, and other politicians are now under pressure to build a new culture of consensus in a deeply divided society, observers said.

The court ended months of uncertainty and political friction by ruling on Wednesday that Mr Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP, would not be banned despite being guilty of Islamic tendencies, in violation of the secular constitution.

The court issued a “serious warning” to the AKP and cut public funds for the party. Newspaper reports said the AKP will have to pay back about 23 million Turkish lira (Dh72.3 million), half of what it received from state coffers this year.

“The court’s decision was purely political,” said Sahin Alpay, a political scientist at Istanbul’s Bahcesehir University.

He said the judges wanted to “overcome the terribly polarised political situation” in Turkey. “All parties will now have the opportunity to review their positions and to take the other side into consideration.”

A conflict between Kemalists, which see themselves as champions of secularism and dominate such key institutions as the army and the judiciary, and a rising class of more observant Muslims, led by Mr Erdogan, intensified in recent months after the AKP pushed trough a constitutional amendment allowing female students to wear the Islamic headscarf in university. The amendment was struck down by the Constitutional Court in June and played a role in the court case against the AKP.

On Istanbul’s streets yesterday, people expressed relief at the court’s decision in the AKP case. Halice Celik, a young woman wearing the headscarf who described herself as an AKP voter, said she was happy with the verdict. “I am more hopeful [for Turkey’s future] today than I was yesterday,” she said.

Even people who did not vote for Mr Erdogan’s party were satisfied with the ruling. “I am not an AKP supporter, but I think the decision was good because it will help the economy,” said Mustafa Atesoglu, 38, a worker. The verdict opened the way for a new spirit of compromise in Ankara, he said. “Hopefully, politicians can come together. We all have to live together.”

Investors and businessmen agreed with Mr Atesoglu’s optimistic assessment.

Shares on the Istanbul stock exchange rose sharply in early trading yesterday. The Turkish Industrialists’ and Businessmen’s Association, or Tusiad, a lobby group, said that “Turkish democracy has successfully passed an important test of maturity” with the verdict.

That sentiment was echoed by many comments in the media, which hailed the verdict as balanced and stressed the court’s call on government and opposition to reach agreement on such sensitive issues as the headscarf.

“It was the best possible decision,” the Vatan newspaper said.

In the daily Sabah, the columnist Erdal Safak wrote: “Whatever the political opinion they may have, our people want consensus, they want peace and quiet, they want stability.”

Ertugrul Ozkok, the editor-in-chief of Hurriyet, Turkey’s biggest newspaper, called on Mr Erdogan to “seek a way of consensus” as required by democratic rules, while demanding that the main Kemalist party, the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, also end its confrontational stance. “Is it true only for him?” Mr Ozkok asked, in reference to Mr Erdogan. “Surely not. The main opposition party must do the same thing.”

Critics accuse Mr Erdogan, whose party won 47 per cent of the vote in a general election last year, of ignoring the interests and concerns of his opponents. Observers said that Mr Erdogan, chastened by the court ruling, is likely to change his confrontational style.

Sedat Laciner, the head of the Centre for International Strategic Studies, a think tank, said he expected Mr Erdogan to heed the court’s warning. “I think there will be steps by the AKP to ease the tension,” Mr Laciner told the online newsportal Gazeteport.

Those steps could include talks between AKP and CHP on how to solve the headscarf issue, a task that has proved insurmountable so far. Two out of three women in Turkey wear the scarf but are not allowed to enter university campuses with covered hair. The AKP said this is unfair, while the CHP argues that the headscarf is a symbol of political Islam that has to be kept out of public institutions.

Turkey’s army, which has toppled four governments since 1960 and last year issued a coup warning against the AKP, is also strictly against changing the headscarf rules.

“For us, our ideas concerning secularism have never changed,” the army chief Gen Yasar Buyukanit said after the verdict. At the same time, the general said he did not want to comment on the court’s verdict itself and that the army’s stance on secularism had “nothing to do with day-to-day politics”.

His remarks suggested that the army is likely to keep out of the political debate after the court decision. Gen Buyukanit will retire shortly and is preparing to hand the army leadership over to his designated successor, Gen Ilker Basbug, who is expected to be named as the new chief of general staff at a meeting this weekend.

For politicians in Ankara, one of the issues to resolve after the AKP verdict is the question of how to prepare a new, more democratic constitution. The text is to replace Turkey’s current basic law, which was introduced after the last military coup in 1982.

A group of specialists commissioned by the AKP wrote a draft for the new constitution months ago, but Mr Erdogan’s party never officially published the draft despite promising to share it with other parties and non-governmental organisations.

Work on a new constitution and changes to the political party law, which would make it harder for the court to dissolve parties, will be opportunities for politicians in Ankara to show that they can work together, Mr Alpay said. “Those will be the test cases.”

It was unclear yesterday if Mr Erdogan or Deniz Baykal, the CHP leader, were willing to compromise. Mr Erdogan promised that his party would defend secularism, but stressed at the same time that the AKP had never violated Turkey’s secular principles – even after the Constitutional Court had said exactly that. Mr Baykal, for his part, said the court’s decision had pointed to a “deep crisis” in Turkey and that the AKP had to engage in self-criticism after the verdict.

Some Turks doubt that Mr Erdogan and Mr Baykal will ever agree on anything.

“Of course it was good,” Turgut Becera, a 74-year old pensioner in Istanbul, said about the verdict. “But the [political] fight will go on. Those two will never get together.”