Be prepared for Turkey becoming a more sharia compliant state.
And the Europeans condemned any military involvement in removing him long ago when they had an actual chance.
ERDOGAN TIGHTENS GRIP ON TURKEY
Referendum approving all-powerful presidency leads the way to dictatorship.
Turkey’s Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has engineered the path to his virtual one-man rule of Turkey. A very small majority of Turkish voters approved a controversial referendum on Sunday to amend the country’s constitution, converting the largely ceremonial post of president into a highly powerful chief executive. The amendments eliminate the post of prime minister and confer vast new powers on the president to issue decrees as law and make judicial appointments. The changes will obliterate any semblance of a democratic republic with checks and balances among independent branches of government. They will take effect with the 2019 presidential election. Erdogan is expected to run for the newly empowered presidential office, which he could hold onto for at least two terms through 2029.
The constitutional amendments will simply formalize the creeping autocracy and Islamization that Erdogan has imposed on the Turkish people during his years as prime minister from 2003 to 2014, and while serving in the supposedly ceremonial post of president since 2014. The current prime minister is an Erdogan loyalist.
Turkey has been operating under emergency rule since last summer’s failed coup. A vast purge of government workers suspected of opposing the government took place, accompanied by mass arrests. The alleged dissenters removed from their positions cut across academia, the police, the military, prosecutors and the judiciary. Turkey also accounted for nearly a third of the global total of journalists arrested world-wide in 2016. More than 100 news outlets were closed down.
In the run-up to the referendum, opponents were physically assaulted and intimidated. Authorities prevented some opposition rallies from taking place. Opponents of the referendum have charged that the referendum results were fraudulent, complaining of last-minute changes in the rules that allowed ballots to be counted without the legally required official stamp.
An International Referendum Observation Mission, conducted by the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (which includes Turkey as a member), was highly critical of the referendum campaign. It found that the “constitutional referendum took place on an unlevel playing field and the two sides of the campaign did not have equal opportunities… Supporters of the ‘No’ campaign faced a number of undue limitations on their freedom to campaign. Many ‘No’ campaigners suffered physical attacks. A high number were arrested, most often on charges of organizing unlawful public events or insulting the president.”
