opinion<\/a> on December 9, criticising Turkey for abusing state of emergency laws declared after the 15 July coup attempt.<\/p>\nThe proposed overhaul of the constitution is presented to the public as a step to uphold \u201cTurkish nationalism and to protect the state\u201d.<\/p>\n
Even though there has been no consultation or public debate, and the main opposition People\u2019s Republican Party and the Kurdish-affiliated Peoples\u2019 Democratic Party have been completely side-lined, the bill will most likely be approved by the parliament and put before the country.<\/p>\n
The referendum is planned sometime before next May and the presidential and parliamentary elections are scheduled to be held in 2019.<\/p>\n
The best way to guarantee success for the president and his party would be to maintain or heighten tensions in the country until the referendum. Presenting people with a choice of instability or support for the ruling party has worked well before.<\/p>\n
The stakes are even higher this time and everyone should brace themselves for a tough and unpredictable few months to come.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Now that the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), and its keen new ally The Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) have submitted their bill to parliament to amend the country\u2019s constitution, \u00a0Turkey has taken another leap in its march to authoritarianism. Signed by every deputy of the 316-strong governing party, the draft constitution, nevertheless, needs at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[4],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firdevstalkturkey.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28839"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firdevstalkturkey.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firdevstalkturkey.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firdevstalkturkey.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firdevstalkturkey.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28839"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.firdevstalkturkey.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28839\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28842,"href":"https:\/\/www.firdevstalkturkey.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28839\/revisions\/28842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firdevstalkturkey.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firdevstalkturkey.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firdevstalkturkey.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}