BY DERYA SAZAK
MILLIYET- Ankara and Brussels have at last overcome the penal code crisis. EU Enlargement Commissioner Guenter Verheugen told reporters after meeting with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Brussels that there were ‘no more obstacles’ on Ankara’s path towards opening membership negotiations with the European Union. Moreover, European Commission President Romano Prodi stated that the commission’s progress report on Turkey due out Oct. 6 would be ‘fair and objective.’
Our Parliament is now expected to hold an extraordinary session on Sunday. Although the Erdogan administration seems to have successfully dealt with the so-called adultery crisis, Ankara should expect similar problems in the near future. Our journey to the European Union is likely to be riddled with such many crises.
When our government withdrew the penal code reform bill from Parliament after a row over a controversial clause to outlaw adultery, Europeans believed that Turkey's chances of joining the EU had been thrown into doubt. They truly saw the move as a serious deviation from the EU. Had Erdogan insisted further on the adultery issue, he would probably have lost his credibility on the continent, something difficult to recover in the eyes of the Europeans.
As a matter of fact, we should draw some lessons from the recent crisis. First of all, our decision-making mechanisms must be further democratized and our Parliament strengthened. It wasn’t Brussels which created the adultery crisis. In other words, there’s no point in insisting that the crisis erupted because of impositions from Brussels. If the government and Parliament really don’t want Brussels to intervene in our domestic politics, they should not then transform such rows into huge crises by their own hands. The adultery crisis was an artificial one, and it’s been resolved by Brussels’ pressure. But what will happen when Turkey faces more serious problems in the future? How will our Parliament prove its will then?