Turkey’s move to abandon parliamentary democracy and adopt one-man rule fulfills a long-held dream of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
who not only expands his powers, but also gets a chance to stay in
office for another 15 years if the current referendum
ballot count holds up.
The official Anadolu news agency said the
country voted on Sunday 24.3 million to 23.2 million, a margin of 51.1
to 48.8 percent, in favor of a package of constitutional reforms. But
the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) said it will challenge
well over 1 million ballots which lacked the seal of the election
oversight board.
If Erdogan prevails in the end the result will be a system under which there’s no
prime minister, where the parliament will be weakened to the point of
being a rubber stamp, and the judiciary will become still more
subservient than it is already.
The path to one-man
rule—opponents talk of a “dictatorship”is the story of a politician
with a gut instinct for gaining power who’s seized on every political
setback that’s come his way in the past two years and turned it into an
opportunity to advance his ambitions. It is the people of Turkey who will suffer at the hands of this madman who will do anything for power. We are seeing Turkey going backwards towards a muslim Caliph in everything but name.
There are Turkish-Americans here in America who have contacted us here and asked us to begin coverage on what is happening in Turkey. So, we will begin to report on the political diatribe and Democratic regressions happening in Turkey for the near future.
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