Turkey was just one judge’s vote away from a constitutional coup. But after three days of secret deliberations, Turkey’s constitutional court voted six to five not to ban the country’s ruling party and exclude its top leaders from power. Seven votes were required to shut the party down on charges of allegedly plotting to introduce Islamic law to secular Turkey – a judgment which would certainly have plunged Turkey into a full-blown political crisis. Instead the court’s members – hardline secularists all – nevertheless decided to pull back from the brink and impose a simple penalty of cutting the party off from State funding – effectively a slap on the wrist for the AKP, but at the same time a face-saving solution for the judges.
Chief prosecutor, Aburrahman Yalcinkaya had demanded that Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country's president, Abdullah Gul, and 69 other AKP figures be banned from politics for five years. Their crime, according to the lengthy indictment, was that they had allowed the party to become a focal point of “anti-secular activity". In particular, the prosecutor was incensed by the AKP’s lifting of a two decades-old ban on female students wearing Islamic headscarves at university.
A seemingly trivial pretext, perhaps, for banning a democratically elected government – and one which is the most popular in modern Turkish history. But the court case is just the latest and most dramatic episode in a decades-old confrontation between political Islam and the secular establishment, which has sworn to keep religion out of public life in accordance with the radical secularism of Turkey’s founder, Kemal Ataturk. In 1999, just three years before his party swept to power, Erdogan himself was imprisoned for sedition after reciting a religious poem at a rally. And just last year, Turkey’s politically powerful military tried - unsuccessfully - to prevent Gul's election to the presidency, also because of his strong religious beliefs and his headscarf-wearing wife. The AKP called the military’s bluff by immediately calling an early general election, which it won in a landslide, and then successfully re-nominating Gul. The secularists’ response to that defeat was to draft the indictment which was knocked down by the court today.
Nevertheless, the AKP must tread carefully to avoid more time-wasting battles which have distracted the ruling party from much needed reforms and spooked markets. "I hope the party in question will evaluate this outcome very well and get the message it should get,” warned chief justice Hasim Kilic in his ruling. "The verdict on cutting treasury aid has been given because of members who decided that the party was the hub of anti-secular activities but not seriously enough [to close the party].” The subtext was clear: the court had decided to spare the party – and spare the country months of political turmoil – but now expected the AKP to steer clear of more provocative moves such as the headscarf law.
The ruling is good news for Turkey’s path to the European Union. EU enlargement commissioner Olli Rehn said that "despite everything, this is a good day for Turkey and for Europe … There is a vast majority among the Turkish people who are in favour of European values. I'm sure this played a role, as stated by the president of the Turkish constitutional court."
It should also allow the AKP to take up a long delayed reform program on free speech and democratization. “Today’s decision by the Constitutional Court not to close down the ruling Justice and Development Party has averted a political crisis in Turkey,” says Emma Sinclair-Webb, Turkey researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The ruling party should honor its election promises now and revive the long-stalled reform of human rights in Turkey.”
