President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan highlighted the need for a new constitution to replace the current one, which was drafted during the coup-era.
"It's not possible for current constitution to sustain Türkiye anymore," Erdoğan said at a news conference following a cabinet meeting in the capital Ankara on Monday.
He noted that the Turkish democracy should gain a new and civilian constitution to settle old scores with the tradition of coups.
The debate over the Constitution has been lengthy and for more than a decade, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his ruling Justice and Development Party (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 were mostly political and they opposed 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.
The document has undergone nearly 20 amendments over the years to keep up with global and regional geopolitical conjectures. The most notable changes were introduced via referendums in 2010 by enabling the trialing of the 1980 coup plotters in civil courts and in 2017 by replacing the parliamentary system with an executive presidency.
In 2007, Erdoğan’s AK Party attempted an overhaul when it employed a commission to produce a draft, which was shelved upon heated criticism from the opposition.
Since then, the party has been working on “stronger” material. Its proposed changes focus on freedom, the right to security, the right to a fair trial, freedom of speech, and the rights of women and the disabled. The enhancement of these rights and liberties has seen setbacks in the bureaucracy that have prevented them from being appropriately implemented.
Meanwhile, President Erdoğan said Türkiye declared a day of mourning for the tragic helicopter crash in Iran, where President Ebrahim Raisi, Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian and other officials died.
The day of mourning was declared to share the pain of the Iranian people after the deaths of President Raisi and other officials, Erdoğan said.
Noting that Türkiye played a role in search and rescue efforts for Raisi after news emerged that a helicopter he was on crashed in northwestern Iran, Erdoğan said:
"A Bayraktar Akıncı UAV conducted 7.5 hours of search and scanning activities in the region despite the difficult weather conditions and flew a total of 2,100 kilometers (1,305 miles)," he added, referring to Türkiye's domestically manufactured unmanned aerial vehicle.
After Raisi's helicopter crashed, Türkiye's National Defense Ministry assigned the Akıncı UAV and a Cougar-type helicopter with night vision capabilities to help in search activities.
