The Government’s energy

Obviously this month’s NATO summit in Istanbul will be a good opportunity for Turkey as well, and we should take advantage of it. Ankara has six months before possibly receiving a date to start membership negotiations with the European Union. Ankara met the political and legal Copenhagen criteria and now it should spend this time dispelling opposition and hesitation about Turkey within European countries. It should expend all its energy on intensive diplomacy and lobbying in European countries.

Towards this end, Turkey should halt domestic political quarrels and focus on the EU issue with all its institutions. Keeping the issues of the Board of Higher Education (YOK) and imam hatips in the spotlight and rattling the public would mean wasting Turkey’s time and energy. Universities and the general education system both have serious problems. For this reason, radical short-term reform is needed. The government is focused only on the imam hatip religious schools, which is inappropriate both in terms of timing and the need for a radical solution.

Commenting on President Ahmet Necdet Sezer’s veto of the YOK bill, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that nobody should consider himself above the will of nation, but this statement is incompatible with the workings of democracy and rules of the Constitution. Sezer’s authority doesn’t mean that he’s above the will of the nation. If democracy means that whoever gets the most votes can pass whatever law they want, there would be no need for the president, vetoes, opposition parties or the Constitutional Court. If they didn’t exist, our regime wouldn’t be a democracy, but a dictatorship. The government can re-pass a law in Parliament if it was vetoed by the president. Then the president must sign the law but if he deems it necessary, he can also apply to the Constitutional Court to strike it down. So the mechanism is very clear and raising tensions between institutions won’t be beneficial, particularly during this time.”