Is the “democratization package” that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced on Monday, Sept. 30, the best thing that has ever happened to Turkey? According to the pro-Erdogan media, that was almost the case, and the “Sept. 30 Revolution” had to be applauded with fanfare. According to the anti-Erdogan voices, however, all the democratic reforms that the prime minister announced were either inadequate or illusory, and no one should have been fooled by such tricks.   

I guess I am among those who take the third view: Yes, Erdogan’s democracy package was far from creating the ideal Turkey overnight, and it even fell short of some important expectations. Yet still, all the 28 separate legal reforms Erdogan announced deserve praise and support. While the prime minister may have deserved a lot of criticism in the past few years, and especially since the beginning of the Gezi Park protests in June, for his authoritarian tendencies and divisive rhetoric, this time he seems to be doing something right, and why not support him when he does something right? 

The bulk of the reforms in question relate to Turkey’s most serious and lethal problem: the “Kurdish question,” or the tension between Turkey’s strict official nationalism and the aspirations of its large Kurdish minority. Throughout much of the 20th century, the Turkish Republic tried to “solve” this problem in very crude ways: simply by banning the Kurdish language and culture and suppressing Kurdish revolts with heavy-handed security measures. Yet, since it came to power in 2002, Erdogan’s AKP (Justice and Development Party) has replaced both of these longtime policies with legal reforms for Kurdish rights and political dialogue with Kurdish separatists. 

In this sense, some of Monday’s reforms can be seen as a continuation of AKP’s general policy on the Kurds. For example, look at these two clauses: