BY HALUK SAHIN
RADIKAL- Here is an important political question (or should I say opportunity?) now facing Turkey: Could the will of the masses expected to flock to tomorrow's protest rally in Izmir be harnessed to fuel the democratic reform Turkey needs so badly? Or can Turkey move towards modernizing its democracy thanks to this internal dynamic, the pressure the masses have unexpectedly brought to bear?

Professor Turkan Saylan, who I appeared alongside the other night on television, believes this is possible, and links the increasing search for women candidates to this. Saylan thinks this trend will continue. 'This spring, masses intervened in political democratization, and they won't give this up,' says Saylan, 'Especially the women filling the streets in the protests will demand and ask for account from now on.' I hope that she's right...

We know that the main reason behind the need for political reform is the deep crisis of representation.

Here's what I mean by representation crisis: We claim that our style of governance is representative democracy, but right now the will of the people can't be fully reflected in Parliament. This problem stems from the election system's 10% threshold. Due to this threshold, the votes of the nearly half of the people are discarded, as a result of which millions of people aren't represented in Parliament. Moreover, they don't have their own deputies owing to the election system. We even don't know the names of those representing us.

That isn't all. Half of our population is made up of women, but the rate of women parliamentarians is only 4.4 %.

What about the young people? Half of our population is under the age of 25, but you can't find a single parliamentarian of that age. A constitutional change enabling those as young as 25 to be elected has yet to be approved.

As for our nearly 5 million citizens living abroad, it's very hard for them to vote. They are far from not only our country, but also from the polls.

Furthermore, minorities recognized under the Treaty of Lausanne - i.e. Greeks, Armenians and Jews - aren't fully represented in our system. Alevis and Kurdish citizens also complain that their votes aren't reflected in Parliament, as they want.

So can we really say that our system, which fails to reflect the will of such a large and important group of people, should be called representative?"