Turkey's parliament begins interparty talks for new constitution

Türkiye seeks to ditch its patchy Constitution, a legacy of a military junta. Spearheaded by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party), efforts to replace the current Constitution with a new one entered a new phase on Tuesday. Numan Kurtulmuş, speaker of the Parliament dominated by the AK Party, met with main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) parliamentarians at the Parliament on the issue. [ . . . ] The debate over the Constitution has been lengthy for over a decade. The AK Party championed the struggle to gain the support of other political parties to draft a new constitution. The opposition has been reluctant and, at times, outright hostile to the attempts to create a new constitution. Their reasons are mostly political and they oppose a constitution to be “imposed” upon them by the government, despite Erdoğan’s repeated remarks that they want to consult with other parties before starting the work. The current Constitution was enforced in 1982 following a military coup that led to the detention of hundreds of thousands of people along with mass trials, torture and executions, which still represents a dark period in Turkish political history.
Read the full article here: Daily Sabah