Turkey at Post-Kemalist Crossroads
Turkey is going through a post-Kemalist transition with problems and habits of the former region still prevailing.
Turkey at the moment is a country going through a peculiar transition. We are moving from the former regime, the Kemalist military tutelage, to a new regime — but what kind of a regime will that be? That is the question in everybody’s mind now.
Will it be a liberal democratic regime that we all crave for with respect for human rights, democracy and established market institutions or will it be a new tutelage regime where only the acts of the former regime have been modified and non-democratic bureaucratic forces still prevail and where free and just elections are held only for show?
After today, every week I will try to explain to Al-Monitor readers the realities of today’s Turkey with all their features. To understand today, we have to look at yesterday to try to understand which direction Turkey is heading.
A vast proportion of Turkey was delighted with the disappearance of that totalitarian regime that treated religious people, Kurds, Alevis, Christians and Jews as a second-class citizens and did not hesitate to persecute them. During the reign of the former regime, the Turkish state’s definition of an ideal citizen was:
