As some of you may already know, Turkey’s megalomaniac President Erdogan is in town and there have been people protesting him every since he’s arrived. That’s no big surprise.
But apparently these protesters are getting under the skin of Erdogan’s bodyguards, so much so that they had to be reprimanded by the Secret Service to act like adults:
Erdogan’s bodyguard was giving the protesters the finger! Wow. Way to incite the protesters. Just imagine what these bodyguards do in Turkey when there is no one to control them!
It’s been awhile since we’ve written about Erdogan’s plans for Turkey, so I figure this is as good a time as any.
As many of you know Erdogan is trying to get the approval of the Turkish people to rewrite their constitution and make himself the new sultan (caliph) of Turkey, which is already in full throttle this year. It was just announced earlier this week that the AKP (Erdogan’s party) is going to begin rewriting the constitution in the next week or so with plans to have it done by May. This is obviously in advance of the referendum needed to do this, but I believe it is an attempt by Erdogan and his forces to convince people this is the constitution they really need.
Part of the problem is that the polls still haven’t shown en masse that the Turkish people are ready to give Erdogan his new powers. That’s a big reason they’ve been using heavy-handed techniques to take out all the opposition media outlets, including Zaman recently, sadly. They are still trying to convince people to do this.
At the end of the day I believe they will succeed in convincing enough people to vote for this so that they can claim they have the legitimacy of the Turkish people.
But should they not succeed in convincing people, at which point they would never hold a referendum, I have a theory about their backup plan.
In the Turkish Parliament they would need 367 seats in order to have the 2/3rds majority needed to rewrite the constitution on their own without the need for a referendum. They currently only have 317 seats. (Now that’s still shy of the 330 needed to do a referendum, but I’m sure they can twist a few arms, threaten a few families, pay people off, whatever, and get the remaining 13 votes needed). There’s a great divide between 317 and 367 seats, 50 seats to be exact.
Let me stop here and point out that Erdogan has recently been talking about the need to redefine terrorism to include not only the terrorists themselves, but anyone who supports it in any way, even vocally. And of course terrorism to Erdogan is really anything that disagrees with him, so let’s be clear that’s really what we are talking about.
Now if you’ve been following Turkey at all in the last year, you know Erdogan went to war with the Kurds last summer and now terrorism plagues the Turkish people, whether from ISIS or Kurdish militias. So when Erdogan is talking about redefining terrorism, he’s definitely talking about anyone who supports the Kurds or ISIS in anyway.
Now back to the Turkish parliament. In the parliament they have four parties, one of which is the HDP. They are a new party and have won 79 seats in last November’s elections. The HDP is the Kurdish party.
So here’s my thinking. If the referendum doesn’t work out for some reason, I think Erdogan will redefine terrorism to include the HDP Kurdish party and take them completely out of the parliament. That leaves 79 seats that Erdogan could fill with AKP hacks in some form of interim government, giving him more than enough seats needed to unilaterally rewrite the constitution.
Or he could just say that the parliament is smaller now and 314 seats, 2/3rds of the current 471 seats in the parliament, is all that is needed to rewrite the constitution.
Of course this plan would be fraught with much more difficulty and could potentially cause riots in Turkey and international blowback, which is why I think it is only a backup plan. I think Erdogan would much rather do this via a referendum so he can claim the people are behind him.
But don’t be fooled. Erdogan is a power hungry megalomaniac and there’s no doubt in my mind he would do this if his referendum failed. After all, Turkey is very much the biggest Antichrist player that we see in scripture and Erdogan is the type of man to let nothing stand in his way.
