Turkey ruling party escapes ban – barely
Turkey’s highest court has announced that it will not close down the governing Justice and Development party on charges of undermining the country’s secular system.
Most of the “Don’t dare offend” newspapers in the West offered headlines like the Wall Street Journal: Turkey’s Constitutional Court Votes to Support Government. Which is a lie. A majority of the judges voted against the AK Party.
Six of the court’s 11 judges voted in favour of closing down the party, just one short of the seven required to impose a ban, Hasim Kilic, the head of the constitutional court, said.
But the court, he stressed, was still sending the AK party, a “serious warning” by cutting half of the treasury funds it was entitled to this year…
Fadi Hakura, a Turkish analyst with the London-based Royal Institute of International Affairs, said that the government could face a crisis again if it continued pursuing what he said was their previous agenda of more religion…
Turkey is one of the oldest and strongest secular governments in the Middle East. Unlike, Iran, for example, they’ve never had a democratically-elected government overthrown by the CIA and replaced with a monarchy. They have less motivation to march backwards towards theocracy as any kind of solution.
