The YOK “education reform” draft bill, which includes a special provision for helping the vocational high school graduates with the Turkish university entrance exams, has passed the Turkish Parliament after a grueling 18-hour session at the General Assembly.
If it becomes the law of the land, it will provide the Imam and Preacher School (IPS) graduates with special “affirmative action” advantages at the standard college entrance exams.
Now the bill will be sent to Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer who, in all likelihood, will veto the bill and send it back to the Parliament for a review.
The AKP-dominated Parliament, as a response, will most likely send the same bill back intact to the President who does not have the right to veto it for a second time.
Thus he will end up putting his signature under the bill with one hand while sending it to the Turkish Constitutional Court with the other.
The chances are the Constitutional Court will declare the bill unconstitutional (according to a number of Turkish mainstream commentators) and that will be the end of both this bill and the long controversy that pitted the AKP government against the Turkish universities, Armed Forces, and the mainstream media.
The issue flared up this quickly because what started as an argument about an “education issue” quickly escalated to a wholesale confrontation about the definition of political legitimacy in Turkish politics, and its relation to national sovereignty and electoral majority.
A practical policy matter thus has climbed to risky theoretical heights in no time due to AKP's defiant and ill-timed insistence on passing this bill in a hurry and the secular establishment's ever-present paranoia about AKP's “real agenda.”
AKP basically drew “a line in the sand” about its absolute right to legislate any law it deems necessary since AKP won a legitimate election and thus was accorded the mandate to exercise political sovereignty in the name of those who elected AKP to do precisely that. Doesn't the huge inscription on the wall of the General Assembly Hall at the Turkish parliament state that “Sovereignty Belongs to the People Without Any Conditions”? Why should AKP shy away from exercising that sovereignty in the name of the people and opt for YOK (Higher Education Board) or the universities or some other non-elected body exercise it instead?
The opposition, on the other hand, argued that the sovereignty indeed belongs to the “people” (millet) and not to the Parliament (meclis). Parliament is just one of the state organs through which the national sovereignty is exercised in the name of the people -- but not the only organ. The Constitutional Court, for example, is another actor which (while having no power of its own to legislate or execute) determines the constitutionality of the Parliament's legislation. Thus political legitimacy does not derive simply and directly from a parliamentary majority but rather emerges from the matrix of compromises established among the values and interests of different political actors in a democracy, whether they are elected by popular vote or not. This is more or less the argument of the other side in a nutshell.
Here I would like to mention a recent commentary by Hurriyet's Sedat Ergin which examined the premise that the composition of today's Turkish Parliament does represent the true choices of the Turkish people. Because all arguments that question the AKP government's “rights” or “legitimacy” sooner or later end up also questioning this main premise of “true representation,” or “who represents whom at the Parliament.”
Here is how Mr. Ergin analyzed AKP's electoral performance and reached very interesting conclusions indeed.
When AKP won the November 3, 2002 elections single-handedly, there were 41.4 million registered voters of which only 32.7 million cast their votes. 8.6 million registered voters abstained from voting. Thus 20.86% of the registered voters did not vote in 2002 general elections. This corresponds to the lowest rate of electoral participation since the 1983 elections.
Of the 41.4 million registered voters, AKP has received the votes of 10,808,000 voters, or 26.1%.
That is, only 1 out of every 4 registered voters has voted for AKP.
Thus for every voter that chose AKP, 3 either opposed it or did not go to the polling booth. Thus in 2002 when AKP won 34.2% of the votes, only 1 out of every 3 Turks who actually voted has voted for AKP.
However, AKP has captured 66% of the Parliamentary seats.
That's how Ergin reaches the conclusion that “there is a problem of political representation in the Turkish Grand National Assembly.”
AKP has won 363 of the 550 Parliamentary seats in 2002, which went up to 367 with subsequent “transfers.”
The glaring non-correlation between the percentage of the votes received (1 in 3) and the percentage of parliamentary representation (2 out of 3) is clear, thanks to the high electoral threshold of 10%, rarely seen in European Union countries, Ergin continued.
DYP, for example, with 9.5% of the votes, could no enter Parliament due to that 10% threshold. 3.8 million voters who voted for DYP are not represented today in the Parliament. Similarly, 2.6 million voters who voted for MHP can also consider their votes going down a black hole.
Sedat Ergin calculated that almost 16 million Turkish voters (46.5% of total votes) could not see their political choices translate into parliamentary representation. 16 million is greater than the total populations of Israel (6 million), Ireland (3.8 million) and Finland (5.2 million) combined.
Thus Ergin concludes that, although AKP's legitimacy is beyond reproach, there does exist an issue of representation in the Turkish parliament.
In the March 2004 local elections, the number of voters went up to 43.5 million while the percentage of those who abstained from voting also rose from 20.8% to 23.7%. In 2004, 10.3 million voters did not vote.
AKP has garnered again an impressive victory by increasing its total local votes to 13.4 million in the Province General Assembly elections.
AKP has won 41.6% of the votes actually cast, but only 30.8% of those who actually have registered to vote.
Thus Ergin concludes that 70% of the registered voters did not choose to vote for AKP in March 2004.
This might go some ways in explaining the wide-spread resistance to AKP's “education reform bill” although AKP enjoys two-thirds of the Parliamentary seats.
The explanation may lie in the fact that the same AKP does not also represent two-thirds of the voters.
A parliamentary majority without an electoral majority sometimes translates to such questioning of political legitimacy by the opposition forces.
(This also reminds me of the situation after the 2000 U.S. Presidential elections... President Bush has won the Electoral College votes but not the popular vote (which went to Al Gore)... and ever since questions about his administration's "legitimacy" have hounded Mr. Bush, even long before the Iraqi debacle.)