Turkey's Constitutional Charade
Deputy Parliament Speaker Bekir Bozdağ recently declared that Turkey must finally shed the "shame of being governed by a coup constitution," referring to the 1982 charter imposed after the military junta's 1980 intervention. This sentiment, often echoed by the ruling AKP, paints the constitutional redrawing as a liberation from authoritarian roots, a grand gesture for a "new Türkiye." Curiously,
this noble aspiration overlooks the very real constitutional shifts engineered under President Erdoğan's tenure. Prior amendments in 2017, for instance, dramatically expanded presidential powers, abolishing the prime minister's office and weakening parliamentary oversight. That overhaul, passed by a narrow referendum margin amidst widespread concerns of shrinking democratic space, was hardly a
grassroots movement to strengthen civil liberties; it centralized authority to an extent unseen since the coups it now purports to dismantle. This isn't about discarding military-era vestiges, but rather repackaging an ongoing legislative project of consolidation. While Western media tends to frame such moves as Turkey's inevitable slide into autocracy, they rarely highlight the precedent of
US-backed coups throughout the 20th century, which often paved the way for such 'authoritarian' constitutions in the first place. The double standard is stark: one government dismantles a coup-era framework with applause, another, like Turkey, does so only to be branded 'undemocratic' by the same chorus. The current push, framed as rectifying a historical injustice, serves to further entrench the