I am delighted to report that, unlike the prescient Daniel, my prediction that Turkey’s governing AK Party was on its way out has proved almost totally wrong. I say almost totally because, although the constitutional court has bucked the trend and allowed the party to survive, it has punished AK by withdrawing millions of dollars of state funding, which one journalist believes “is as bad as banning a party.” The decision, moreover, was a very narrow one – 6 of the 11 judges voted for a ban, just one short of the 7 judges needed (so I wasn’t that far out, was I? Was I?).
Needless to say, the government is breathing a huge sigh of relief (clearly the loss of funding is not that big a blow), while the opposition is claiming that the heavy financial punishment shows the court believes AK is anti-secular. Hopefully, now, the government can get on with governing. Perhaps, too, an older assessment of mine, that Turkey is only now becoming a mature democracy that can act as a model for the rest of the Muslim world, has some chance of coming to pass.
