Turkish reforms pass by wide margin

Istanbul: Turkish voters approved a sweeping package of constitutional reforms by a wide margin on Sunday, handing a major victory to the Islamist-rooted government that continued the country's inexorable shift in power away from the secular Westernised elite that has governed modern Turkey for most of its history.

The changes were intended to bring Turkey's military-imposed Constitution in line with European standards of law and democracy, but were widely viewed by voters and politicians here as a referendum on the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

According to unofficial results issued late Sunday night, the package of 26 constitutional amendments passed with 58 percent of the vote, the semiofficial Anatolian News Agency reported.

"The 'yes' verdict in today's referendum is a result of our nation's longing for democracy," Mr. Erdogan told the country in a live television broadcast, punctuated by outbursts of his supporters chanting, "Turkey is proud of you."

"The main message out of the ballot boxes is that our nation said yes to advanced democracy, yes to freedoms, yes to the superiority of law -- not the law of the superiors -- and yes to the sovereignty of national will," he said.

A statement released by the White House said President Obama called Mr. Erdogan to congratulate him and "acknowledged the vibrancy of Turkey's democracy as reflected in the turnout for the referendum that took place across Turkey today."

Analysts said the vote would bolster the government's prospects of winning re-election next spring, but was also likely to reinforce sharp ideological divisions in this deeply polarized country.

The governing Justice and Development Party, which proposed the changes, portrayed the constitutional overhaul as an effort to strengthen Turkey's democracy while helping clear its path toward membership in the European Union. The amendments, the government says, represented a long-overdue attempt to revamp a Constitution ratified after a military coup whose 30th anniversary was on Sunday.

But opponents of the changes describe them as an orchestrated power grab aimed at undermining the secular order established by the republic's founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, in 1923, and giving religious conservatives power over the military and judiciary, the last independent guardians of the secular state.

"The suggested changes are nothing more than the ruling party trying to convert institutions that do not favor their government, closer to their side," Sedat Ergin, a columnist of Hurriyet, a leading newspaper, wrote before the vote. "After these changes, all we would be left with would be a system lacking checks and balances."

The heated debate over what both sides portrayed as the future of this Muslim democracy on Europe's edge drew nearly 36 million voters to the polls, a remarkable 77 percent of eligible voters, Anatolian News Agency reported.

Analysts say the vote will have profound consequences for general elections in the spring, buttressing the government, whose popularity has waned in recent months as the economy has faltered, and improving Mr. Erdogan's chances of winning a third successive election victory.

Western diplomats said the vote would also embolden Mr. Erdogan's increasingly assertive foreign policy. His Justice and Development Party has sought to make Turkey a player in regional diplomacy as a European bridge to other Muslim countries.

In the past year, Turkey has conducted its own negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, resulting in an agreement that Western officials said undermined international efforts to curtail Iran's nuclear ambitions. In May, a Turkish organization led a flotilla that tried to break Israel's blockade of Gaza; while the flotilla ended in bloodshed at sea, the attention it drew to the blockade helped force a softening of Israeli policy and cast Mr. Erdogan as a hero to the Muslim world.

It is in the domestic arena, however, that the constitutional changes will have the deepest repercussions.

The package includes popular and relatively uncontroversial measures that would strengthen the rights of women, children, workers and civil servants. It would also make the military answerable to civilian courts, lifting immunity from prosecution for the leaders of the bloody 1980 coup.

But proposals to strengthen the control of the president and Parliament over the appointment of judges and prosecutors are seen by critics as a barely veiled attempt to erode the separation of powers between the executive and the judiciary. The amendments assign greater power to Parliament and the president to choose members of the Constitutional Court and the Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors, both traditional bastions of secularism that have clashed with Mr. Erdogan's party in the past.

But the government said the changes were necessary to tame dangerously activist judicial bodies that have consistently undermined the decisions of Parliament and the executive.

"There is an activist understanding of the judiciary in the current system that undermines the will and decisions of the legislative and executive organs," Justice Minister Sadullah Ergin said before the vote. "This new model will prevent today's legal system from leading the country into a judicial dictatorship, while paving the way for other progressive reforms."

Sitki Altun, 60, a retiree who arrived at Besiktas Bingul Erdem High School in Istanbul despite heavy rain to vote "yes," said the changes would strengthen democracy.

"We have been ruled and oppressed by military coup constitutions since the 1960s," he said. "Despite all the criticism, at least this is the first civilian attempt to change that."

Since the founding of the republic, military coups have removed elected governments from power three times. The current Constitution has been altered more than 10 times over the last decade, but has never been completely scrapped, which many constitutional scholars believe is necessary to bring Turkey in line with Western democratic norms.

But pro-democracy activists, who have long argued that the Constitution gives too much power to the military and the judiciary, were concerned that the new changes could end up shifting power too far in the other direction.

The suspicion of the government's motives has been fostered by the arrest and detention of dozens of people accused of plotting coups, known as the Ergenekon plots. Most of those arrested have been military officers, but academics, journalists and writers who had been vocal critics of the government have also been arrested.

While the proposed changes have been supported by the European Commission, the European Union's executive branch, European officials have expressed concerns that the changes could politicize the judiciary and polarize the country.

One voter, Celal Durukan, 63, a former journalist, said the amendments reflected a government intent on extending its influence. "This is just an effort to get the judiciary under their control," he said.

But Mithat Sancar, a law professor at Ankara University, said the vote was neither a victory for the government nor a failure of the opposition.

"This result shows that the majority in Turkey opposes with the influence of the military and judiciary in active politics," he said. In the long run, he said, the amendments passed Sunday will make Turkish politics more democratic and civilian.

"This is people's demand for democratic politics to be the tool in resolving the issues, which all parties should take as an important message before elections."