Turkish Democracy - on the brink

**Philippus Flavius Homovallumus** · 02-12-2017, 02:29

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-38883556

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkis...ferendum,_2017

Turkey is going to hold a Referendum in April on whether to abolish the post of Prime Minister and transfer executive functions to the President. Parliament will also lose a lot of its ability to scrutinise the executive, conduct enquiries, that sort of thing.

Now the question, really, is whether the military saw this coming and dried to stop it or if they helped it along with the attempted coup.

Regardless, Turkey is now in great danger of falling into the trap of being "just another" Middle Eastern tin-pot Republic like Egypt.

**Greyblades** · 02-12-2017, 04:07

We can now add Attaturk's coffin to the list of sources of clean rotational energy.

**Strike For The South** · 02-12-2017, 16:13

This is what brain drain gets you.

**a completely inoffensive name** · 02-13-2017, 07:28

To be honest, from I know of Ataturk's constitutional system, it was inherently reliant on a military ready to perform coups ('for the people') to restore the government to its original state. This is not the most well thought out structure for several reasons...

**Pannonian** · 02-13-2017, 10:58

Originally Posted by a completely inoffensive name

To be honest, from I know of Ataturk's constitutional system, it was inherently reliant on a military ready to perform coups ('for the people') to restore the government to its original state. This is not the most well thought out structure for several reasons...

One can only do what one can with what one has. The region has a strong tendency towards religious nutterism. The most "western" state in the region, Israel, is only so because of continued efforts by liberals and socialists. And even they have to pander to the religious nutters to some extent.

**rory_20_uk** · 02-14-2017, 10:25

If they keep killing each other over there, hopefully they'll forget about is over here.

Most states in the Middle East have boundaries that make little sense from our "Western" standpoint of self determination (or most of the time, our populace is to apathetic to try to gain freedom - barring Catalonia) and are glued together by violence and the threat of more violence.

In such environments people seem to tend to turn to strong (generally) men to Sort Things Out.