But they are not that feeble or undetermined. The idea that state officials know everything and they should oversee, and sometimes block, the decisions of elected politicians is a deep-seated belief in Ankara. Most bureaucrats, military or civil, in fact think that they own the state, and they have the sacred duty of protecting it from citizens who have not fully embraced the holy principles of Kemalism. Unfortunately those “unenlightened citizens” make up around 80 percent of the population, so their representatives keep on winning elections. Hence comes the bureaucratic oligarchy's continuous resentment of, and resistance to, democracy.

Protecting Statism

In the good old days, the military was the main actor in this resistance — with all its guns, tanks and torture chambers. But in post-modern times the high judiciary has come to the fore with a more refined tool: the usurpation of political power through overreaching legal decisions.

One recent and exemplary case has been the blocking of the privatization of Petkim, a state-owned petroleum company, by the Administrative Court called “Danıştay.” The free-market oriented AKP government had decided to sell 51 percent of the company to an international consortium for $2.04 billion. But last December the judges at Danıştay stopped the process by declaring, “There is no public good in the privatization of a state company which is making a profit.”

Please note that this was a political assessment, not a legal evaluation. Therefore, by their decision, the judges usurped the political power which actually belongs to the elected government. Their reference was not any legal precedence, but rather an ideological commitment to public ownership and resentment toward private property. This commitment, of course, comes from Kemalism, the six pillars of which include the principle of “statism.”

Secular Fundamentalism

Yet statism is a side issue when compared to what lies at the core of the judiciary's ideology: secular fundamentalism.

The perfect case study in this regard is the headscarf ban, which is in force in all schools and universities in Turkey, public or private. Some people wrongly think that the ban is based on a law, but it actually is not. It rather is based on a series of decisions given by the Constitutional Court in the 1990s. The court simply argued that the constitutional principle of secularism (laïcité) requires the banning of religious symbols in all public spaces, and especially educational institutions.

But there are different ways of interpreting secularism, and many people, including myself, think that it includes freedom of religion as well as freedom from religion. But the bureaucratic oligarchy believes only in the latter. Hence the Constitutional Court insists that the headscarf ban should be kept intact.

In the political spectrum, only the CHP agrees with the Constitutional Court. (No big surprise: As I have said, the CHP is the political wing of the bureaucratic oligarchy.) Other parties, including the incumbent AKP, the MHP (Nationalist Movement Party), and even the pro-Kurdish DTP (Democratic Society Party) want to lift the ban in universities. So, can't they simply make a law in Parliament and set the veil free?

No. If they were to do so, the Constitutional Court would cancel that law by saying that it violates the constitution. Therefore, the only way to set the headscarf free is to make an amendment to the constitution, or to introduce a totally new constitution, specifically saying something like, “citizens can't be barred from university education because of their dress code.”

The CHP Republic

This formula has been discussed for sometime and it recently surfaced in Prime Minister Erdoğan's speech in Madrid in which he promised to make a constitutional change to give freedom to wearers of the headscarf.

Among the secularists hell broke loose. And a few days later the empire struck back — via its judiciary. The chief prosecutor of the Supreme Court of Appeals, Abdurrahman Yalçınkaya, made a sinister speech in which he argued that allowing the headscarf would destroy secularism and tarnish society. He went much further by implying that the AKP could be closed down by his office for “attempting to undermine the secular Republic.”

Isn't that breathtaking? A bunch of judges sitting in Ankara decide what secularism means, and then they say that the constitution cannot be touched by the elected representatives of the people to give secularism a different, more liberal meaning. Moreover, they threaten to close down the political parties that might dare to take that heretical step.

Alas, if they keep their word, they will have to close down not just the AKP, but also all others except the CHP. To be consistent, our top judges should also consider renaming our state, which is mistakenly called the “Turkish Republic,” and define it as what it really is: The CHP Republic.