Whose Contract Is the Constitution?

A Class History for Young Comrades, from Magna Carta to the Soviet Constitutions, from the Kanun-ı Esasi to the AKP's "Civilian Constitution"

October 4, 2026 at 12:44 AMAuthor: Oğuz Demirkapı

Whose Contract Is the Constitution?

A Class History for Young Comrades, from Magna Carta to the Soviet Constitutions, from the Kanun-ı Esasi to the AKP's "Civilian Constitution"

The Situation in Brief: What Is Happening, and What Does This Piece Tell?

Dear Young Comrades,

The Grand National Assembly opened the new legislative year on 1 October 2026. From the rostrum President Erdoğan said this: "Because of the political diversity it contains, the period we are in is the most suitable period for a constitutional amendment." He added that coup constitutions had built a "tutelary system," that their stance on the first four articles was "definite," and that he was calling all parties to a "Great Turkey Consensus" and to a "test of sincerity" (10Haber, Gazete Birlik). The next day the Speaker of Parliament, Numan Kurtulmuş, described the 467 "yes" votes given in August to the "framework law" as "a fine key that will easily open every door"; Bahçeli said the constitutional drafts were ready and would be shared "at a suitable time" (Medyascope, Sabah).

In the same days the following is happening in Turkey. According to what was reported on the evening of 3 October on the programme Bilanço, in September alone 1,270 accounts and publications were closed or blocked; the 17-year-old T24 was shut down; the mayor of Mersin Metropolitan Municipality, Vahap Seçer, was detained in a dawn operation; the fund scandal reached the government's closest circle; the main opposition party was "returned," by a court ruling, to its former chair, and its elected leadership and 91 deputies were forced to found a new party. The government says "a civilian, libertarian constitution" on the one hand, and on the other does not even apply the constitution it holds: the Constitutional Court's ruling on Can Atalay still stands on paper.

This piece sets out on a long road in order to understand this contradiction. In short, what we will say is this:

A constitution is a photograph, put into writing, of a balance of forces between classes. Ferdinand Lassalle said this in a single sentence in 1862: the real constitution is the actual relations of power in a country; a written constitution that does not correspond to those relations is "a scrap of paper."
In the world, the history of constitutions is the history of concessions that struggles from below forced those above to sign. Magna Carta is the barons' text against the king, 1789 the bourgeoisie's against the aristocracy, 1917 Mexico the peasants' and workers' against the landlords, and the Soviet constitutions of 1918 and 1936 the texts the working class wrote against all the exploiting classes. Social rights (work, education, health, retirement) entered the world's constitutions under the pressure of the Soviet experience and of the workers' movement.
In Turkey, the history of constitutions is the history of constitutions the people did not write. The sultan suspended 1876; a liberation-war assembly wrote 1921 and 1924; the junta of 27 May had 1961 written, the junta of 12 September had 1982 written. The only exception was the working class widening, in the street, the space that 1961 had opened; 12 March and 12 September came precisely in order to close that space.
The AKP has been amending the constitution for 24 years, but always without touching the class core of 12 September. The amendments of 2007, 2010 and 2017 did not lift the tutelage; they changed its owner. Trade-union rights, strike bans, the Council of Higher Education, the Directorate of Religious Affairs, the state of emergency and presidential powers are still in place; what is more, they have widened.
Even the constitution we hold is in practice suspended. The Court of Cassation did not comply with the Constitutional Court's rulings on Can Atalay, and filed a criminal complaint against the members who gave the ruling; Parliament stripped Atalay of his deputyship and did not implement the Constitutional Court's decision that this was "null and void." The president of the local court that resisted the Constitutional Court was promoted, and is today the Minister of Justice. The European Court of Human Rights' rulings of "immediate release" for Kavala and Demirtaş have not been implemented for nine years, by the opening of new files or by turning a detainee into a convict. A regional court of appeal changed the chair of the main opposition party. Local and high courts have in practice placed themselves above the constitution. A government's call for a "new constitution," when its own constitution is not applied, is an attempt to constitutionalise the de facto situation.
Today the wish for a new constitution has three concrete reasons: that under the present constitution Erdoğan cannot stand again in 2028 (Article 101); that the "50+1" lock of the 2017 system has come to threaten the government itself; and that the new parliamentary arithmetic produced by the "Terror-Free Turkey" process (467) is to be turned into a constitutional majority.
As with omnibus laws, in a constitutional package too the real matter is the article that is not put in the shop window. Between bright headings such as "equal citizenship," "a civilian constitution" and "escaping the coup constitution," there can be placed the resetting of the term of candidacy, the lowering of the electoral threshold to 40+1, the making permanent of the executive's domination over the judiciary and Parliament, the opening of new zones of prohibition through "the family" and "national values," and the reinforcement of capital's guarantees of property and arbitration.
The parties' stances should be read through their class places. The AKP and the MHP want the constitution for the continuity of power; the YENİ Party is against "circumventing the spirit of the constitution" but avoids questioning the system itself; Kılıçdaroğlu's CHP stands in a place close to the palace; the DEM Party is at the bargaining table with the expectation of peace and equal citizenship; the İYİ Party is building a nationalist "no" front. The independent voice of the working class is heard only in the left and socialist parties and in the unions; and even that is not loud enough.
Our answer: neither the "status quo" nor "Erdoğan's constitution." To take the question of the constitution off the palace's table and carry it into the workplaces, the neighbourhoods and the unions; to organise for a programme of a labourers' constitution that puts at the centre the right to strike, trade-union freedom, public services, equal citizenship, secularism and popular sovereignty.

In what follows we will first tell the history of constitutions in the world, beginning with Magna Carta; we will give a special place to the Soviet constitutions of 1918 and 1936. Then we will pass to Turkey and read every constitution and every amendment, from the Deed of Alliance to 2017, with the questions "who wrote it, whom did it protect, whom did it leave outside?" Then we will tell the constitution's present de facto condition, through the files of Can Atalay, Enis Berberoğlu, Osman Kavala, Selahattin Demirtaş and Ekrem İmamoğlu, and how the Court of Cassation and the local courts have refused to recognise the rulings of the Constitutional Court and of the European Court of Human Rights. Then we will come to today's debate, to the logic of the omnibus law, to the parties' stances, and to our tasks.

First the Concept: What a Constitution Is, and What It Is Not

At school you were taught that a constitution is "the state's founding document, the highest legal norm." True, but incomplete. This definition tells us what a constitution does, not why it exists.

Historically a constitution has had three functions:

To organise power: who makes the law, who applies it, who judges; how these powers are shared.
To limit power: the fields the state cannot touch, that is, fundamental rights and freedoms.
To legitimise power: with sentences such as "sovereignty belongs unconditionally to the nation," to present a given relation of power as the common will of the whole society.

Bourgeois law schools focus on the first two. Marxism draws attention to the third: the constitution is presented as the contract of the whole of society, but in history no constitution has been written above the classes. Every constitution is the minute of how much concession which class was forced to give to which class at the moment it was written.

Lassalle's Scrap of Paper

Ferdinand Lassalle, one of the leaders of the German workers' movement, asked this in the lecture "On the Essence of the Constitution" (Über Verfassungswesen) that he gave in Berlin in 1862: what is a country's real constitution? His answer was this: the king and the army, the aristocracy, the great industrialists, the bankers, and last, to the extent that it is organised, the people. The actual relation among these forces is the real constitution. The constitution written on paper lives to the extent that it corresponds to this relation; when it does not correspond, it remains "a scrap of paper," and before cannon and rifle it has no force.

Many of Lassalle's political choices were sharply criticised by Marx and Engels; but this analysis is still of use today. Article 153 of the Constitution in Turkey says "the decisions of the Constitutional Court are final and binding on everyone." The non-implementation of the violation rulings given on Can Atalay shows that this sentence has turned into a scrap of paper in the face of the real relation of power in Turkey.

Marx's Reading of the 1848 Constitution

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), while reading France's constitution of 1848, Marx proposes a method we can still use today. The constitution generously proclaims every freedom: the press, assembly, organisation, education, religion. But beside every article it drops a small reservation: "regulated by law," "within the limits required by public security." According to Marx, every paragraph of this constitution carries its own opposite inside it: freedom in the general sentence, the abolition of that freedom in the marginal note.

Put these glasses on when you read Turkey's constitutions. Article 26 of the 1982 Constitution recognises freedom of expression, and its second paragraph says it may be restricted for the purposes of "national security, public order, public safety, the fundamental characteristics of the Republic, and the protection of the indivisible integrity of the State's territory and nation..." Article 51 recognises the right to form a union, Article 54 recognises the strike and immediately afterwards lists in which branches it is forbidden, and gives the Council of Ministers (today the President) the power to postpone a strike on the grounds of "general health and national security." A right in the general sentence, a ban in the marginal note.

Constitution and Class Struggle: Three Theses

Throughout this piece we will use three theses:

First thesis: Constitutions are the product of the class struggle, not its cause. You cannot change class relations by writing a good constitution; but changing class relations can be reflected in a good constitution.
Second thesis: Constitutional rights that have been won live for as long as the force that won them stays organised. The rights of a class that becomes disorganised can be emptied without being erased from the text.
Third thesis: The ruling classes change the constitution not only in order to limit the people, but also in order to regulate the relations among themselves. In Turkey the greater part of the AKP's constitutional amendments is the rearrangement of the sharing of power among the rulers (army and civilian bureaucracy, community and party, palace and party).

The History of the Constitution in the World: From Magna Carta to Today

Magna Carta (1215): the Barons' Contract

When the history of constitutions is told, it usually begins with Magna Carta, signed on 15 June 1215 in England, in the meadow of Runnymede. Liberal historiography tells it as "the birth certificate of freedom." Whose freedom?

King John was collecting ever heavier taxes from the nobles in order to finance the wars in France. The armed barons took London and made the king sign a text of 63 articles. The most famous article of the text, the provision known today as Article 39, is this: no free man may be arrested, imprisoned or dispossessed except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land.

Note the expression "free man." In thirteenth-century England the great majority of the population consisted of serfs bound to the land (villeins), and this article did not cover them. An important part of Magna Carta's articles concerns feudal taxes, inheritance rights, forests, debts and the privileges of the Church. That is, Magna Carta is an agreement on the sharing of power, made between two sections of the ruling class, between the crown and the landed aristocracy.

What is more, the fate of being a scrap of paper began at once: a few weeks later Pope Innocent III declared the text invalid, and civil war broke out. Magna Carta was reissued in 1216, 1217 and 1225; each time some of its articles were taken out according to the balance of forces.

But history is ironic. Centuries later, in the English revolution of the seventeenth century, the Levellers and then the American colonists took this text in hand and used it for their own demands. One class's document of privilege turned into the ground of a struggle for rights for later classes. This is our first lesson: a principle that the rulers accept among themselves can be seized and widened by those below.

A note on Turkey: The text in the Ottoman Empire most often likened to Magna Carta is the Deed of Alliance of 1808. This document, signed between the powerful local notables in the provinces and Mahmud II, provided that the sultan would guarantee the notables' property and life, and that the notables would show loyalty to the sultan. The reaya, that is the masses of peasants and artisans, were not the subject of the text; they were a source of tax. As soon as the sultan found the opportunity, he liquidated the notables.

The English Revolutions and the 1689 Bill of Rights

In the seventeenth century the rising bourgeoisie in England, and the section of the landed nobility that was becoming capitalist, settled accounts with the absolutist crown. In the civil war of the 1640s the king was executed. In this process the most radical demands came from plebeian movements such as the Levellers and the Diggers: the right to vote for everyone, the opening of the common lands to the people. In the Putney debates of 1647 the Leveller spokesman Thomas Rainsborough defended the propertyless vote, saying "the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he." Cromwell's son-in-law Ireton said the vote should belong only to those who had "a permanent interest in the kingdom," that is, to property owners. Ireton won.

The Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 brought a guarantee against arbitrary arrest. The "Glorious Revolution" of 1688 and the Bill of Rights of 1689 settled the supremacy, over the king, of Parliament, that is of the propertied classes. Tax could not be imposed without Parliament's consent. But the right to vote belonged only to a small propertied minority. In England the vote for all adult men came only in 1918, and women's vote equal to men's in 1928; both with the century-long struggle of the workers' movement and of the women's movement.

The American Constitution (1787): the Republic of Property

The United States Constitution, written in Philadelphia in 1787, is praised as the world's oldest written constitution still in force. The separation of powers, federalism, and the Bill of Rights added in 1791 (the first ten amendments) are still a model for many constitutions.

But let us look at who the founders were. In An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, published in 1913, the historian Charles Beard documented that the great majority of the delegates at the Philadelphia meeting were holders of government bonds, land speculators, merchants and slave owners. Some of Beard's details were later debated, but the main thesis stood: the Constitution was the attempt of creditors and property owners, frightened by debtor-farmer revolts such as Shays' Rebellion of 1786, to found a strong central state.

The text protected slavery without naming it: the counting of enslaved people as "three-fifths of a person" in the census (Article I, Section 2), the return of fugitive slaves to their owners (Article IV), the inability to prohibit the slave trade until 1808. The abolition of slavery came in 1865 with the 13th Amendment, that is, at the end of a civil war. The effective securing of Black people's right to vote came only in 1965, after the bloody struggle of the civil rights movement.

That the Supreme Court which "interprets" the Constitution in the United States today counted corporate election spending as "freedom of speech" with the 2010 Citizens United ruling shows that the republic of property is still at work 230 years later.

The French Revolution: the Declaration of 1789, 1791 and 1793

The most radical of the bourgeois revolutions was lived in France. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, adopted on 26 August 1789, begins with the sentence "Men are born free and equal in rights." This sentence is one of the great gains of human history. But Article 17 of the same declaration proclaims property "an inviolable and sacred right."

The Constitution of 1791 divided citizens in two: "active citizens" who paid a certain amount of tax could vote, "passive citizens" who did not pay could not. Women were not there at all. In 1791 Olympe de Gouges wrote the "Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen": "If woman has the right to mount the scaffold, she must also have the right to mount the rostrum." In 1793 she was executed by guillotine.

In 1791 the Le Chapelier Law, which banned the organisation of workers, was passed in Paris. The class face of the bourgeois revolution is clear here: while the privileges of the aristocracy were abolished, the workers' right to come together was also banned, as contrary to "free contract." Unions in France were legalised only in 1884.

The constitution adopted in 1793, in the Jacobin period, was the most democratic text up to that day: manhood suffrage, the right to work or a guarantee of subsistence for those who could not work, the right to education, and in Article 35 a startling provision: "When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is for the people, and for every section of the people, the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties." This constitution never entered into force, on the grounds of the conditions of war; after Thermidor it was shelved.

Let us also not forget another revolution: Haiti. In the French colony of Saint-Domingue the enslaved rose, and under the leadership of Toussaint Louverture they proclaimed in 1801 a constitution that prohibited slavery; in 1804 independent Haiti was born. For "universal human rights" to be truly universal, the enslaved had first to take up arms.

1848: Revolutions, Constitutions, and the First Workers' Demands

In 1848 a wave of revolution swept Europe. After the February revolution in Paris, the provisional government, under the pressure of the workers, recognised the "right to work" and opened "National Workshops" that would give work to the unemployed. In June 1848 the bourgeoisie closed the workshops, the Paris workers rose, and the rising was crushed with thousands of dead. In the constitution adopted in November 1848 the "right to work" had no place; in its stead a vague promise of "aid" was put. As Marx tells in The Class Struggles in France, the demand for the "right to work" meant, in the eyes of the bourgeoisie, workers' control over capital, and for that reason it was unacceptable.

The same year Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto. Among the Manifesto's demands were a progressive tax, free public education, and the abolition of child labour. These demands were found utopian that day; in the twentieth century they entered many constitutions.

The Paris Commune (1871): Not a Constitution, a New Form of State

The Paris Commune did not write a constitution; but with the decisions it took in 72 days it set out the principles of a new political organisation. As Marx summarised in The Civil War in France:

Representatives were elected by universal suffrage and could be recalled at any moment.
All public officials received a worker's wage.
The Commune was "a working body," uniting legislation and execution, not a parliament that only talked.
The standing army was abolished and the armed people put in its place; the church was separated from the state.

In bourgeois constitutions the separation of powers is in fact a filter that makes it harder for the people's will to reach the executive. The Commune reversed this: the question was not the balancing of the powers against one another, but the entry of all the powers under the people's control. This principle became the core of the constitutional thought of later workers' states.

The Mexican Constitution of 1917: the First Social Constitution

The first great social constitution of the twentieth century came not from Russia but from Mexico. The Querétaro Constitution of 1917, adopted at the end of the peasant revolution led by Zapata and Villa (1910–1920):

With Article 27 it proclaimed that the land and the wealth underground belonged originally to the nation, and opened the way to the division of the great estates.
With Article 123 it wrote into the constitution workers' rights such as the eight-hour day, the right to strike, a minimum wage, and the protection of the labour of women and children.

This was a first in the world. But in Mexico too the gulf between paper and reality was not closed for a long time; land reform gained a real momentum only in the 1930s, in the period of Cárdenas, and in 1992 Article 27 was pruned by neoliberal reforms.

The Soviet Constitutions: the First Constitutions Written by the Working Class

The breaking point in the history of constitutions is the October Revolution of 1917. Because for the first time a constitution was written not as a compromise among the propertied classes, or as a concession they gave to the people, but as the document of the power that workers and peasants had founded against the exploiting classes. We will keep this section a little long, because in school books it is either not told at all or it is passed over in a single sentence as "totalitarian."

The RSFSR Constitution of 1918: "He Who Does Not Work, Neither Shall He Eat"

On 10 July 1918 the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets adopted the constitution of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). The country was in the middle of civil war and of the intervention of 14 states. The first part of the constitution was the "Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People," adopted in January 1918. The Declaration of 1789 spoke of "man and citizen"; the Declaration of 1918 spoke openly of a class, of "the working and exploited people." This is a revolution of language in the history of constitutions: the constitution no longer claims to be above the classes; it writes openly which class's power it has founded.

The basic provisions of the 1918 Constitution were these:

Power belongs to the Soviets. Russia was proclaimed a republic of Soviets of workers', soldiers' and peasants' deputies. All power, at the centre and in the localities, belonged to these Soviets.
The abolition of private property in land. All land, forests and underground wealth were counted as national property; the banks were nationalised, and workers' control was recognised in the factories.
The universal duty to work. Article 18 said that "the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic considers work the duty of all citizens and proclaims the slogan 'He who does not work, neither shall he eat!'" This slogan was aimed at the classes that lived on the labour of others without working.
The right to vote was bound to labour. Article 64 recognised the right to elect and to be elected, without distinction of sex, religion or nationality, to everyone who had reached the age of 18 and who earned their living by productive work or by work socially useful. Women won a vote equal to men's; at that date this did not yet fully exist even in Britain, France or the United States.
The exploiters had no vote. Article 65 wrote that those who employed wage labour for profit, those who lived on unearned income such as rent and interest, private traders and middlemen, the clergy, and members of the old tsarist police and gendarmerie could not vote. Bourgeois constitutions left the propertyless outside; the Soviet constitution left the propertied exploiters outside.
Weighted representation between town and country. To the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, one deputy was elected for 25,000 electors in the towns, and one for a population of 125,000 in the rural regions. This institutionally secured the vanguard role of the working class in the revolution. Bourgeois critics called this "inequality"; the Bolsheviks saw it as a temporary arrangement, born of the specific conditions of the revolution.
The material guarantee of rights. The most original side of the 1918 Constitution was that it did not content itself with proclaiming rights, but also wrote their material conditions. For freedom of the press, the giving of printing houses and paper to workers and peasants; for freedom of assembly, the opening of meeting halls, together with their heating and lighting, to the use of the labourers; for the right to education, free education. This is Marx's criticism of 1848 put into practice: freedom of the press for those who have no press, freedom of assembly for those who have no hall, is an empty word.
The separation of religion and the state. The church was separated from the state, the school from the church; freedom of religious and of anti-religious propaganda was recognised together.
Internationalism. Article 20 recognised the rights of citizenship, without any formality, to foreign workers living and working in Russia. Article 21 gave the right of asylum to foreigners persecuted for political and religious reasons. Citizenship was bound not to lineage but to labour.

The Constitution of 1918 was a civil-war constitution, and it did not hide this: it openly proclaimed the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is, the power the working class had founded in order to break the resistance of the exploiting classes. As Lenin stressed in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918), the form of bourgeois democracy that looks "equal for everyone" is in reality the democracy of the rich; Soviet democracy is openly the democracy of the majority, of the labourers.

In 1922 the Soviet Union was founded, and in 1924 the Union's first constitution was adopted. This text regulated the federal relation among the republics and recognised each republic's right to secede from the Union. The right of nations to self-determination was written, for the first time with this clarity, into a state's founding document.

The USSR Constitution of 1936: the Constitution of Social Rights

On 5 December 1936 the Eighth Extraordinary Congress of Soviets adopted the new Constitution of the USSR. The draft had been opened to popular discussion for months, and hundreds of thousands of proposals had been made at meetings in which millions of people took part. This constitution rested on the thesis that, with the completion of industrialisation and collectivisation in the Soviet Union, the exploiting classes had been liquidated, and that society consisted of "friendly classes": workers, collective-farm peasants, and intellectuals.

The basic provisions of the 1936 Constitution:

Universal, equal, direct and secret suffrage. On the grounds that the exploiting classes had been liquidated, the voting restrictions of 1918 and the weighted representation of town and country were lifted. The right to vote was recognised for everyone who had reached the age of 18, including the clergy (Article 135).
Socialist property. The foundation of the economy is socialist property in the means of production (state and cooperative-collective-farm property) and the abolition of the exploitation of man by man (Article 4). Economic life is directed by the state plan (Article 11).
The right to work (Article 118). For citizens, the guarantee of a job and of pay according to the quantity and quality of their work. The constitution also wrote the guarantee of this right: the socialist organisation of the national economy, the impossibility of economic crises, and the elimination of unemployment. While in the 1930s the capitalist world was choking on the mass unemployment of the Great Depression, this was not a promise left on paper; it was an accomplished fact.
The right to rest (Article 119). The seven-hour day, paid annual leave, rest homes and sanatoria.
Security of subsistence in old age, in sickness and in incapacity (Article 120). State-guaranteed social insurance, free health care.
The right to education (Article 121). Free and compulsory basic education, freedom from fees and scholarships in higher education, education in the mother tongue.
Equality of women and men (Article 122). In every field of economic, political, social and cultural life; equal pay for equal work, maternity leave, crèches and nurseries.
National and racial equality (Article 123). The prohibition of discrimination, of privileges and of propaganda of hatred on the basis of nationality and race. In the same years racial segregation was legal in the south of the United States.
Political freedoms (Article 125). Freedom of speech, of the press, of meeting and of demonstration is guaranteed "in conformity with the interests of the working people and in order to strengthen the socialist system," and, as in 1918, is written together with its material conditions (printing houses, paper, public buildings, the streets).
The role of the party (Article 126). The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) was defined as the "leading core" of all the social and state organisations of the labourers.
Inviolability of the person (Article 127). No one may be arrested without a court decision or a prosecutor's approval.

A Marxist Assessment of the 1936 Constitution

There are two wrong ways of looking at the 1936 Constitution. The first is the bourgeois and liberal view: "fine rights on paper, totalitarian terror in reality." The second is the view without criticism: "a flawless text, a flawless application." Both are foreign to historical materialism. Our principle is the same principle we use for artists: neither saint nor villain; tell the facts, the gains and the errors together.

The gains were real, and they changed the world. The rights of the 1936 Constitution to work, education, health, rest and security in old age were not declarations of intent of the kind "the state watches over, it is regulated by law" that appear in bourgeois constitutions. Behind them there was a planned economy. Unemployment had been abolished, the literacy rate had risen from about 30 per cent in 1917 to over 80 per cent in 1939, health and education were free. The real historical effect of this constitution was seen outside the Soviet Union. The welfare-state constitutions founded in Western Europe after the Second World War, and the social-rights articles of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Articles 22–26: social security, work, rest, an adequate standard of living, education), are the product of the bourgeoisie's anxiety to keep the working class away from socialism, and of the pressure created by the Soviet example. In the capitalist world the welfare state is the child of the fear of socialism.

The tension between law and application was also real. Article 127 prohibited arrest without a court decision or a prosecutor's approval. The years 1937–1938, which began only a few months after the constitution's adoption, were a period in which mass arrests and executions were lived through extraordinary judicial procedures. This period has to be understood inside the real threats of imperialist encirclement, of the legacy of the civil war, of the rise of fascism and of fifth-column activity; but to understand is not to acquit. That many innocent communists, workers and peasants were harmed in this process was also accepted, in a limited way, by the Soviet leadership at the end of 1938, and the excesses were stopped by putting those responsible on trial. The lesson from a Marxist point of view is this: the rights of a socialist constitution live only when the labourers continuously supervise the state apparatus through their own organisations, their Soviets, their unions and their party. To the extent that the apparatus leaves the people's supervision, the most advanced text too can turn into paper.

What happened afterwards? After 1956 the Soviet leadership adopted the theses of "the state of the whole people" and "the party of the whole people." The Brezhnev Constitution of 1977 put these theses into the text; Article 6 proclaimed the party "the leading and guiding force of Soviet society." The discourse of "developed socialist society" took the place of the class emphasis. We assess this turn as a revisionist break, one that denies that the class struggle continues under socialism too. The removal of Article 6 in 1990 and the dissolution of the Union in 1991 were the result not of 1936 but of this break. The Russian Constitution written after Yeltsin shelled the parliament with tanks in 1993 is the constitution of a bourgeois restoration, of an order in which state property was transferred to a handful of oligarchs.

The Lessons That Remain from 1918 and 1936

A constitution should not hide which class's power it has founded. The claim of "everyone's constitution" is, most of the time, the name of the constitution of the powerful.
Rights are rights only when they are written together with their material guarantees. Freedom of the press without a press, freedom of assembly without a hall, the right to work in a country of unemployment, is an empty word.
Social rights (work, housing, health, education, rest, security in old age) entered the world's constitutions through the struggle of the working class and through the pressure created by the existence of socialism. It is no accident that after the socialist bloc dissolved, these rights were eroded everywhere in the world.
No constitution takes the place of the labourers' organised supervision.

Weimar (1919): Social Rights and Article 48

The 1919 Constitution of the Weimar Republic, founded after the November Revolution of 1918 in Germany, was social democracy's most developed text. Article 151 said that economic life had to be ordered in accordance with the principles of justice aiming at "a guarantee of a life worthy of a human being for everyone"; Article 153 wrote that property "entails obligations" and that its use "shall at the same time serve the public good"; Article 165 recognised workers' councils.

But Article 48 of the same constitution gave the President the power, in situations where "public security and order are seriously disturbed," to govern by decree and to suspend fundamental rights. From 1930 onwards Germany was in practice governed by Article 48 decrees, bypassing Parliament. In January 1933 Hitler became chancellor; in February, the day after the Reichstag fire, fundamental rights were suspended on the basis of Article 48; in March 1933 Parliament, while the communist deputies were under arrest, transferred legislative power to the government with the "Enabling Act." The constitution was not even repealed. There was no need.

Weimar's lesson is very familiar for Turkey: provisions for a state of emergency, government by decree, and the executive taking the place of the legislature, are the constitutional road to emptying social rights, however finely you write them. The direct affecting of more than a million people by the 32 decree-laws issued in the state of emergency of 2016–2018, and the turning of presidential decrees into an ordinary instrument of government in the system founded in 2017, are the counterpart here of Weimar's Article 48.

After the Second World War: the Welfare State and the Cold War Compromise

The defeat of fascism and the Red Army's entry into Berlin changed the balance of forces in Europe at the root. In Italy and in France the communist parties were mass parties, the backbone of the resistance movements.

The Italian Constitution of 1947 says this in its first article: "Italy is a democratic republic founded on labour." Article 3 writes the duty of the state to "remove the economic and social obstacles which, by limiting in practice the freedom and equality of citizens, prevent the full development of the human person and the effective participation of all workers in the political, economic and social organisation of the country." These sentences are the product of the weight of communist and socialist representatives in the Constituent Assembly.
The Basic Law of West Germany of 1949 writes, in Article 1, the inviolability of human dignity, and in Article 20 the principle of a "democratic and social federal state." The third paragraph of Article 79 (the "eternity clause") says that these principles cannot be removed even by constitutional amendment: a lesson taken from Weimar.
The preamble of the French Constitution of 1946 recognised the right to strike, trade-union freedom, and the right to health and to rest, and wrote the principle that "any property and any enterprise that has or acquires the character of a national public service or of a de facto monopoly must become the property of the community." On the basis of this principle, banks, energy and transport were nationalised after the war.
The United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. But the Cold War split rights in two: in 1966 the "Covenant on Civil and Political Rights," which the West gave priority to, and the "Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights," which the socialist countries and the countries that had newly won independence brought forward, were adopted separately. The United States never ratified the second. This split is a class split: for the bourgeoisie the "real" rights are those that protect property and freedom of contract; bread, work, housing and health remain as a "goal" or an "intention."

In this period the countries that freed themselves from the colonies also wrote into their constitutions provisions for national independence, land reform and the nationalisation of natural resources. The Portuguese Constitution of 1976, adopted after the Carnation Revolution of 1974, wrote in its first form the aims of "transition to a classless society" and "transition to socialism"; these expressions were filtered out in the amendments of 1982 and 1989, in the process of entry into the European Community.

Neoliberal Constitutionalism: When the Market Is Written into the Constitution

From the end of the 1970s a new understanding of the constitution rose in the world. The political scientist Stephen Gill called this "new constitutionalism": the writing of market rules, guarantees of property and budget discipline into the constitution or into international agreements, so that they cannot be changed by election. Whoever the people vote for, economic policy should not change.

The Chilean Constitution of 1980 was written under the Pinochet junta and under the influence of the economists of the Chicago School. Water rights were counted as private property, pension funds were privatised, education and health were opened to the market. This constitution lived on after the junta too.
The European Union, with Maastricht in 1992 and the later treaties, placed budget-deficit and debt limits, central-bank independence and competition rules above the elected governments of the member states. In 2009 Germany wrote a "debt brake" into its constitution; the Fiscal Compact of 2012 asked member countries to adopt similar rules at constitutional level. In 2015 Greece said "no" to austerity by referendum; a few days later that "no" was turned into "yes" at the Troika's table.
International arbitration and investment treaties, by recognising companies' right to sue states in international arbitration, left public regulation (environment, health, wages) defenceless against capital. The constitutional counterpart of this in Turkey is the amendment of 1999; we will see it below.

Constituent Assemblies in Latin America, and Chile's Lesson

From the end of the 1990s the rise of popular movements in Latin America produced new experiences of constituent assemblies. The constitutions of Venezuela 1999, Ecuador 2008 and Bolivia 2009 were adopted by popular vote; public sovereignty over natural resources, the rights of indigenous peoples, and mechanisms of participatory democracy (recall referendums, social control) were written in. The Ecuadorian constitution became the first constitution to recognise rights for nature itself; Bolivia brought the concept of a "plurinational state." The application of these texts was contradictory, because of the fragility of economies dependent on resource revenues, bureaucratisation and imperialist encirclement; but they are important experiences of the people's direct participation in constitution-making.

Chile is an instructive example in the opposite direction. In the October rising of 2019, millions demanded the removal of the Pinochet constitution. In the 2020 referendum 78 per cent said "a new constitution." The progressive draft prepared in 2022 by the elected Constitutional Convention (social rights, water as public, equal representation of women and men, indigenous rights) was rejected by 62 per cent. Then a second council, in which the right had the weight, prepared a conservative draft in 2023; that too was rejected by 56 per cent. Pinochet's constitution is still in force. The lesson is clear: when the anger in the street does not turn into an organised class will and a hegemonic programme, even the most advanced text can lose at the ballot box; the media and capital use the fear of "uncertainty" with skill.

Authoritarian Constitutionalism: Hungary and Russia

In the last twenty years a third tendency has become marked in the world: authoritarian leaders who come to power by election rewriting the constitution in order to make their own power permanent.

Hungary 2011: Orbán's Fidesz party, with 53 per cent of the vote in the 2010 election, won two-thirds of parliament, and with this majority wrote a new "Fundamental Law" on its own. The powers of the Constitutional Court were narrowed, the electoral system was rearranged in the government's favour, "the family" was defined on the basis of marriage, and in later years provisions criminalising homelessness and hostile to migrants were added.
Russia 2020: Because of Putin's two-term limit, he was not supposed to be able to stand in 2024. Into the constitutional-amendment package of 2020 were put articles pleasing to the people, such as "faith in God," "marriage is a union between a woman and a man," that the minimum wage cannot be below the subsistence level, and the indexation of pensions. The real article inside the package was the provision that "reset" Putin's previous terms of office. Thanks to this article Putin can stay in office until 2036. While saying "yes" to the pension, the people also said "yes" to the reset.

Keep the example of Russia 2020 in mind. It is the cleanest example of a constitutional package being used like an omnibus law, and it resembles the debate in Turkey to a startling degree.

Constitutions in the World: Who Wrote Them, Whom Did They Protect?

Constitution	Class content
Magna Carta (1215)	The landed aristocracy's document of privilege against the king; serfs outside
English Bill of Rights (1689)	The supremacy, over the king, of the parliament of the propertied classes; no vote for the propertyless
US Constitution (1787)	The strong central state of creditors, merchants and slave owners; slavery protected
French Declaration (1789) and Constitution of 1791	The bourgeoisie's victory against the aristocracy; property "sacred," those who do not pay tax cannot vote, workers' organisation banned
France 1793 (Jacobin)	Plebeian pressure: manhood suffrage, the right to subsistence, the right of insurrection; never applied
Mexico 1917	Peasant revolution: land reform, the eight-hour day, the right to strike
RSFSR 1918	The power of workers and peasants; no vote for exploiters; the material guarantee of rights
USSR 1936	The guarantee of social rights by a planned economy; universal and secret suffrage; serious tensions in application
Weimar 1919	A social-democratic compromise; Article 48 opened the door to fascism
Italy 1947, Germany 1949, France 1946	The defeat of fascism and the fear of socialism: the welfare-state compromise
Chile 1980	The writing of neoliberalism into the constitution by the hand of a junta
EU treaties and debt brakes	The removal of economic policy from elections
Venezuela 1999, Ecuador 2008, Bolivia 2009	The constituent assemblies of popular movements; resource sovereignty and participation
Hungary 2011, Russia 2020	The constitutionalism of elected authoritarian leaders making their power permanent

The History of the Constitution in Turkey: Constitutions the People Did Not Write

From the Tanzimat to the Kanun-ı Esasi: Reform from Above

Constitutional development in the Ottoman Empire was born not, as in the West, of a rising bourgeoisie's struggle against the feudal order, but of a collapsing empire's effort to save itself, and of the pressure of the European great powers.

The Tanzimat Edict of 1839 (the Imperial Edict of Gülhane): Security of life, property and honour, the regular collection of taxes, the ordering of military service. A year earlier, in 1838, the Treaty of Balta Limanı had opened the Ottoman market to British capital. The Tanzimat's guarantee of property was, before everything else, the guarantee of the property of foreign and non-Muslim merchants.
The Reform Edict of 1856: After the Crimean War, promises of equality to non-Muslims, under the pressure of the allied European states.

The Kanun-ı Esasi of 1876: the Constitution the Sultan Suspended

The Kanun-ı Esasi, proclaimed on 23 December 1876, is the Ottoman Empire's first constitution. It was prepared by the efforts of the Young Ottomans and Midhat Pasha, but the last word was the sultan's. A Chamber of Deputies and an appointed Chamber of Notables were founded; legislative power was shared with the sultan, and the sultan remained "sacred and unaccountable."

Article 113 of the text gave the sultan the power to exile those who, "by police investigation," were found to disturb the security of the government. Abdülhamid II used this power first against the architect of the constitution, Midhat Pasha: in February 1877 he sent him into exile. A year later, in February 1878, on the grounds of the defeat in the war of 1877–78, he adjourned Parliament indefinitely. The constitution was not repealed; for 30 years it continued to be published, but Parliament did not meet. The purest example of Lassalle's scrap of paper.

1908–1909: the Second Constitutional Period

In 1908, with the rising of the Committee of Union and Progress officers in Macedonia, Abdülhamid was forced to put the constitution back into force. With the amendments of 1909 the sultan's powers were narrowed, the power of exile in Article 113 was removed, and Parliament was strengthened.

But the strike wave of 1908, which came immediately after the proclamation of the constitutional period (more than a hundred strikes were lived that year), showed the class face of the new power. In 1909 the Committee of Union and Progress, by issuing the Law on the Suspension of Work, banned the strike in public services and in practice prevented the founding of unions. The constitution of the bourgeois revolution and the ban on workers' organisation, as with the Le Chapelier Law of 1791 in France, again came at the same moment.

The Teşkilât-ı Esasiye of 1921: the Constitution of the Liberation War

On 20 January 1921, while the Liberation War was going on, the Grand National Assembly in Ankara adopted the Law on Fundamental Organisation. It was a short text of 23 articles, and its first article was this: "Sovereignty belongs unconditionally to the nation." Legislative and executive power were gathered in the Assembly (the "assembly government" system). It gave wide autonomy to local administrations (provincial councils).

The text of 1921 is claimed today by two opposite sections. One section brings forward its emphasis on popular sovereignty, another that it does not contain the principle of secularism. The Kurdish political movement also refers to its provisions on local autonomy. From a class point of view, 1921 is the text of a front in which the peasantry, the notables, the officer and intellectual cadres, and, for a short period, the socialists and Soviet support, came together against imperialist occupation. The murder of Mustafa Suphi and his comrades in the Black Sea on 28–29 January of the same year showed early how narrow the place of the workers' and socialist movement would be kept inside this front.

The Teşkilât-ı Esasiye of 1924: the Constitution of the Republic

The constitution adopted on 20 April 1924 is the Republic's first full constitution. Sovereignty remained with the nation, but the executive was given to the President and the Council of Ministers. Its important amendments:

1928: The expression "the religion of the state is the religion of Islam" was removed.
1934: Women were recognised the right to elect and to be elected as deputies (in local elections in 1930).
1937: The CHP's six principles (republicanism, nationalism, populism, statism, secularism, revolutionism) were written into the constitution.

The period of the 1924 Constitution is the period of the creation, by the hand of the state, of a national bourgeoisie. The principle of "populism" denied the existence of classes: Turkish society was defined as "a mass without privilege, without class, fused together." With the Law on the Maintenance of Order of 1925 the opposition was silenced, the Labour Law of 1936 banned the strike, the Law on Associations of 1938 banned organisation on a class basis, and Articles 141 and 142 of the Penal Code, taken from the penal code of Mussolini's Italy, counted communist propaganda and organisation as crimes with heavy penalties. The constitution said "sovereignty belongs to the nation"; but it was forbidden for the worker to organise, to strike, to found a socialist party. Until 1946 there was a single party, and after 1946 there was a multi-party system only among bourgeois parties. The socialist parties and unions founded in 1946 were closed the same year.

The Coup of 1960 and the Constitution of 1961: the Door the Coup Opened

On 27 May 1960 the army made a coup against the government of the Democrat Party. Prime Minister Menderes and two ministers were executed. The Constituent Assembly founded by the coup-makers (the Committee of National Unity, together with a House of Representatives of appointed and indirectly elected members) wrote the new constitution; it was put to a popular vote on 9 July 1961 and adopted with about 61.7 per cent "yes." It was not a crushing majority; in the regions where the Democrat Party was strong the "no" vote came out high.

The Constitution of 1961 is the most libertarian text in Turkey's constitutional history, and this is a paradox: despite its being a coup constitution. The explanation of the paradox is a class explanation. The alliance that made 27 May was, against the landlords and the commercial bourgeoisie that the Democrat Party represented, an alliance of the industrial bourgeoisie, the bureaucracy, the army and the intellectuals. This alliance wanted, in a limited way, to include the working class in the order, in order to widen the internal market and for planned industrialisation. That is, the social rights of 1961 were a requirement of the industrial bourgeoisie's model of import-substituting development.

What 1961 brought:

The principle of the social state (Article 2).
The Constitutional Court and a two-chamber parliament (the National Assembly and the Senate of the Republic).
The right to form a union, collective bargaining and the right to strike (Articles 46 and 47). In 1963 the Trade Unions Law no. 274 and the Law on Collective Agreements, Strikes and Lockouts no. 275 were passed. The working class of Turkey won a legal right to strike for the first time.
University autonomy, freedom of the press, the right of meeting and demonstration.
The State Planning Organisation and planned development.
But at the same time the National Security Council (Article 111): the constitutional institution of the army's tutelage over politics.

What happened after 1961? The working class entered through this door and widened the door. In 1961 twelve trade unionists founded the Workers' Party of Turkey; Behice Boran, Mehmet Ali Aybar and socialist intellectuals joined the party. In the 1965 elections TİP returned 15 deputies. In 1967 DİSK was founded. In January 1963, while the strike was not yet legal, the strike at the Kavel cable factory in Istanbul hastened the passing of the right to strike into law. Strikes, factory occupations, land occupations and the student movement rose.

The bourgeoisie was frightened by this rise. In 1970 an amendment of the trade-union law aimed at closing DİSK came onto the agenda; on 15–16 June 1970 hundreds of thousands of workers marched in Istanbul and Kocaeli. Martial law was declared. Nine months later, on 12 March 1971, the army gave a memorandum.

12 March (1971) and the Constitutional Amendments of 1971–1973

In the period of the "above-party" governments founded after the memorandum of 12 March, almost a third of the 1961 Constitution was amended. A general restriction was brought to fundamental rights and freedoms on the grounds of "the integrity of the state's territory and nation, national security, public order"; university autonomy and the autonomy of the Turkish Radio and Television Corporation were narrowed; civil servants' right to a union was removed; State Security Courts were founded; the power of decree-law was recognised for the President and the Council of Ministers. TİP was closed, Deniz Gezmiş, Yusuf Aslan and Hüseyin İnan were executed on 6 May 1972, and at Kızıldere Mahir Çayan and his comrades were murdered.

The lesson was this: the door that 1961 opened stayed open for as long as it served the rulers. When the working class began to enter through this door as an independent force, the door was closed.

12 September 1980 and the Constitution of 1982: the Constitution of a Class Coup

On 24 January 1980 the Demirel government announced the IMF programme: export-led growth, the suppression of wages, devaluation, the removal of subsidies, the opening of the state economic enterprises to the market. The man behind this programme was Turgut Özal. The programme could not be applied while there was an organised working class and the trade-union rights of the 1961 Constitution. The Tariş resistance in the summer of 1980 showed this openly.

On 12 September 1980 the army seized the administration. The word, on the morning of the coup, of Halit Narin, the president of the Turkish Confederation of Employer Associations, is the essence of this coup: "Until today the workers laughed; now it is our turn to laugh." After the coup 650,000 people were detained, 50 people were executed, it was documented that 171 people were killed by torture, DİSK was closed, its leaders were tried with a demand for execution, strikes were banned, wages were frozen.

The Constitution of 1982 is the constitution of this coup. The junta had an appointed Consultative Assembly write the constitution; the National Security Council changed it as it wished. It was put to a popular vote on 7 November 1982:

Voting was compulsory; those who did not vote would be deprived for five years of the right to elect and to be elected.
Propaganda against the constitution was forbidden; only Kenan Evren toured the country running a "yes" campaign.
Ballot papers were put into transparent envelopes; "yes" was white, "no" was blue.
With the adoption of the constitution, Kenan Evren was deemed elected President for seven years in the same ballot.
Provisional Article 15 closed the judicial path against all the decisions and acts of the coup-makers.

The result: 91.27 per cent participation, 91.37 per cent "yes." This was not a referendum; it was approval under a threat.

The class core of the 1982 Constitution is this:

A ban on politics for the unions, branch thresholds, strike bans and strike postponements, a ban on the general strike and the solidarity strike (the first forms of Articles 51–54). The collective-bargaining order was so built that even today the rate of workers covered by a collective agreement is below 10 per cent.
A balance between the state and the individual in favour of the state. In the preamble and in Article 14, the possibility of restricting rights on the grounds of their abuse.
The strengthening of the executive, wide powers of appointment for the President, and the constitutional weight of the National Security Council.
The Council of Higher Education (Articles 130–131): the central supervision of the universities.
The Directorate of Religious Affairs being a constitutional institution (Article 136) and the lesson of religious culture and ethics being compulsory (Article 24): the constitutional guarantee of the Turkish-Islamic synthesis, that is, of the use of religion as an antidote to the organised consciousness of the working class.
Provisions for the state of emergency and martial law (Articles 119–122), and a ban on judicial review of the decree-laws issued in these periods.
The 10 per cent electoral threshold that came with the election law of 1983 was not in the text of the constitution, but it was part of the order of political representation of 12 September.

As we will see in the rest of this piece, the discourse of "escaping the constitution of 12 September" has been in the language of every government for 40 years. But no amendment touched this class core, the restrictions brought on the organisation of the working class, and the political use of religion.

12 September was told in detail in Knowledge Commons' dossier "12 September: The History, Balance Sheet, and Present of a Class Coup." As was also stressed there, 12 September is a coup that has never truly been settled with. Kenan Evren was tried and convicted in 2014; but he died in 2015 before the sentence became final. The economic programme of the coup was never put on trial.

The Amendments of the 1982 Constitution: a Text Rewritten Almost Entirely in Forty Years

The Constitution of 1982 was amended nearly twenty times; the greater part of the articles in the first text are today in another form. Despite this it continues to be called "the constitution of 12 September," and this is not entirely unjust. Because what changes is, most of the time, the sharing of power among the rulers; what does not change is the order founded against the working class.

Amendments before the AKP:

1987: The political bans brought on politicians from before the coup were lifted by referendum (6 September 1987; by 50.16 per cent, by a hair's breadth).
1995: The praise of 12 September in the preamble was removed; the ban on politics brought on unions and associations was partly lifted; civil servants were recognised a right to a union (but without the right to strike and to collective bargaining).
1999: Two amendments were made together, and in the shadow of one the other was almost never discussed. The military judge was removed from the State Security Courts. The same month, in August 1999, inside the stand-by process with the IMF, privatisation was written into the constitution (Article 47) and the way was opened to international arbitration in disputes arising from public-service concession contracts (Article 125). The Council of State's supervision over concession contracts was weakened. This is the clearest step of neoliberal constitutionalism in Turkey: the sale of public property, and foreign capital's guarantee against the state, were raised to a higher norm that could not be changed by election.
2001: A large package of 34 articles with the European Union harmonisation process; a weight of civilian members on the National Security Council, some widenings in freedom of thought.
2004: The death penalty was wholly abolished; the State Security Courts were abolished; the priority of international treaties on fundamental rights when they conflict with statutes (Article 90).

Amendments in the AKP period:

2007: After the "367 crisis" in the election of the President, the e-memorandum of 27 April and the early election, the election of the President by the people was adopted (the referendum of 21 October 2007, 68.95 per cent). The first stone of the road to the presidential system.
2008: An amendment on the freedom of the headscarf in the universities; it was annulled by the Constitutional Court. The same year the closure case opened against the AKP ended, by a margin of one vote, in a cut of treasury aid instead of closure.
2010: With the referendum held on the 30th anniversary of 12 September (57.88 per cent), a package of 26 articles was adopted. In the shop window: the removal of provisional Article 15, which prevented the trial of the coup-makers; a right of collective agreement for civil servants; the removal of the bans in Article 54 on the political strike, the solidarity strike and the general strike; a public ombudsman; the right of individual application. At the bottom of the package: the changing of the structure of the High Council of Judges and Prosecutors and of the Constitutional Court in a form that would allow the Gülen community, then in alliance with the AKP, to seize the judiciary. The "not enough, but yes" campaign of liberal intellectuals and of some on the left provided this package's hegemonic legitimacy. We know the result: the judiciary passed first into the community's hands, and after 2016 into the palace's. The "collective agreement" recognised for civil servants turned, without a right to strike, into a bargain in which the last word belongs to the Arbitration Board.
The Constitutional Reconciliation Commission of 2011–2013: The commission, in which four parties were equally represented, agreed on 60 articles, but dispersed at the end of 2013. No agreement was reached on the Kurdish question, the definition of citizenship, education in the mother tongue, and the presidency.
2016: A provisional article, aimed at HDP deputies, on the one-off lifting of legislative immunity; it was adopted in Parliament by a majority that left no need for a referendum. Afterwards Selahattin Demirtaş, Figen Yüksekdağ and many deputies were arrested. An important part of the opposition also said "yes" to this amendment.
2017: With the referendum of 16 April 2017 (51.41 per cent), held while the state of emergency declared after the coup attempt of 15 July was continuing, the "Presidential Government System" was adopted. During the vote the Supreme Election Council counted unstamped ballot papers and envelopes as valid. With the amendment the prime ministry was abolished; the President became the single head of the executive and at the same time the chair of a party; the power to regulate by presidential decree, to appoint ministers and senior bureaucrats without Parliament's approval, to prepare the budget, to declare a state of emergency and to dissolve Parliament (to renew the elections) was given to the President; of the 13 members of the Council of Judges and Prosecutors, 4 came to be elected directly by the President and 7 by Parliament (that is, by the majority of the People's Alliance of that period).

With the 32 decree-laws issued in the state-of-emergency period (2016–2018), more than a hundred thousand civil servants were dismissed; associations, foundations, newspapers, televisions and universities were closed. Academics, teachers and trade unionists were sacked from their jobs because of a demand for peace or because of union activity. In 2018 the state of emergency was lifted, but an important part of the powers was carried into ordinary law by Law no. 7145.

A Table: the Shop Window and the Underside of the Amendments of the AKP Period

What was said in the shop window	What was underneath
2007: "Let the people elect their own President"	The first step of the passage to a personalised executive and a presidential system
2010: "Settling with the coup-makers, facing 12 September"	The surrender of the judiciary to the community–government alliance; the economic programme of the coup was not touched
2010: "A collective agreement for the civil servant, the ban on the political strike is gone"	A collective agreement without a strike; strike postponements and branch bans still in place
2016: "Let the deputies who support terror be tried"	The constitutional road to the arrest of opposition deputies
2017: "Strong government, stability, the end of tutelage"	Parliament and the judiciary becoming dependent on the executive; government by one person's decree
2026: "A civilian, libertarian, inclusive new constitution"	The solution of the candidacy problem, the continuity of power, new zones of prohibition (below)

The Constitution's Present Condition: a Text That Has Been Suspended

Before entering the debate on a new constitution, the question we have to ask is this: is the constitution we hold being applied? If in a country the constitution is in force as a written text, but the courts, Parliament and the executive do not recognise its clearest provisions, what is the meaning of writing a new text? In this section we will tell, file by file, how the constitution in Turkey has in practice been suspended, which levels of the judiciary have placed themselves above the constitution, how the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) have been ignored, and the results of this for deputies, journalists and opposition politicians.

What Does the Constitution Say? Four Basic Provisions

Let us first recall the order on paper. These four provisions are the constitutional backbone of a state under the rule of law:

Article 11: "The provisions of the Constitution are fundamental legal rules binding the legislative, executive and judicial organs, the administrative authorities, and other institutions and persons."
Article 138: Judges "give judgement according to their conscientious conviction, in conformity with the Constitution, statute and law." The legislative and executive organs and the administration "are obliged to comply with court decisions; these organs and the administration may in no way alter court decisions or delay their execution."
Article 153: "The decisions of the Constitutional Court are final." The decisions "bind the legislative, executive and judicial organs, the administrative authorities, and real and legal persons."
Article 90, last paragraph (2004): In the event of a conflict between statutes and international agreements on fundamental rights and freedoms duly put into force, "the provisions of the international agreement shall prevail." The European Convention on Human Rights stands at the head of these agreements; Article 46 of the Convention also says that states undertake to abide by the final judgements of the ECtHR.

Let us also add the right of individual application (Article 148), added in 2010. Since 23 September 2012 citizens have been able to apply to the Constitutional Court when their fundamental rights are violated. This mechanism had been brought in to lighten Turkey's load at the ECtHR and to resolve violations of rights inside the country.

On paper the hierarchy of norms is clear: at the top the Constitution and, together with it, the human-rights treaties; beneath it the statutes; at the bottom administrative acts and the decisions of local courts. The Constitutional Court is the guardian of this hierarchy.

Now let us look at the application.

"I Neither Comply Nor Feel Respect": the Story of a Sentence

In February 2016 the Constitutional Court decided that the detention of the journalists Can Dündar and Erdem Gül, arrested because of the news of the National Intelligence Organisation lorries, was a violation of rights, and the two were released. President Erdoğan's reply was this: of the Constitutional Court's decision, "I do not comply, nor do I feel respect." This was the proclamation that a decision which, according to Article 153 of the Constitution, binds everyone was openly not recognised by the person at the head of the state.

This sentence became the road map of the next ten years. From that day on, the non-implementation of Constitutional Court decisions ceased to be an exception and turned into an established method. The method has different forms; we will see them one by one below.

The Can Atalay File: the Court of Cassation's Blow against the Constitution

Can Atalay is a lawyer, one of the jurists of the Gezi resistance, sentenced on 25 April 2022 to 18 years in prison in the Gezi case. While his sentence was under review at the Court of Cassation, he was elected a deputy for Hatay from the Workers' Party of Turkey in the election of 14 May 2023. The people of Hatay, struck by the earthquake, had sent a lawyer in prison to Parliament.

According to Article 83 of the Constitution, an elected deputy has legislative immunity; except for certain crimes whose investigation had begun before the election, their trial stops. Atalay's lawyers demanded release once the election result became final; the local court and the Court of Cassation refused.

What follows is one of the barest crises in Turkey's constitutional history:

25 October 2023: The Constitutional Court decided that Atalay's "right to be elected and to engage in political activity" and his "right to liberty and security of person" had been violated; a retrial and release were required.
8 November 2023: The 3rd Criminal Chamber of the Court of Cassation refused to implement the decision. It did not stop there: it filed a criminal complaint, on the claim of "violating the constitution" and "abuse of office," against the members of the Constitutional Court who had given the decision, and sent a letter to Parliament for Atalay's deputyship to be stripped. A high court, not content with not complying with a decision which the Constitution says "is final and binds everyone," was declaring the judges who gave that decision guilty. This was the moment jurists called a "judicial coup."
November 2023: The chair of the MHP, Bahçeli, proposed having the closure or the restructuring of the Constitutional Court put on the agenda of a new constitution; Erdoğan too, saying that the Constitutional Court had made mistakes one after another, stated that the Court of Cassation's stance could not be ignored. That is, the Court of Cassation's resistance received the support of political power and was tied to the debate on a new constitution.
21 December 2023: The Constitutional Court gave a violation ruling for the second time; it also found that the Court of Cassation's refusal to recognise the first decision was a separate violation.
January 2024: The Court of Cassation did not recognise the second decision either.
30 January 2024: The Court of Cassation's letter was read in the General Assembly of Parliament, and Atalay's deputyship was stripped on the basis of Article 84 of the Constitution. Opposition deputies surrounded the rostrum; Parliament, instead of protecting its own member's right to be elected, implemented the letter of a judicial chamber that ignored the Constitutional Court.
1 August 2024: The Constitutional Court's decision that the parliamentary decision on the stripping of the deputyship was "null and void" was published in the Official Gazette (Medyascope). The President's chief adviser Mehmet Uçum said this decision "openly violated" Article 85 of the Constitution. The Union of Turkish Bar Associations applied to Parliament for the decision to be implemented. The Speaker's office did not implement the decision.
1 October 2026: As Parliament opened the new legislative year, Atalay began a 24-hour hunger strike in prison. His demands were the implementation of the Constitutional Court's decisions, the ending of his detention, and his being able to carry out the duty of a deputy. In his statement he stressed that "he had faced a very great injustice, but that he was not the only person who could not obtain his right" (Medyascope).

The Atalay file is more than a deputy's personal drama. In this file three pillars of Turkey's constitutional order collapsed at the same moment:

The hierarchy of norms collapsed: A chamber of appeal placed itself above the Constitutional Court.
The separation of powers collapsed: Parliament, instead of protecting its own member, implemented the instruction of one chamber of the judiciary; the executive openly supported this picture.
Popular sovereignty collapsed: The will of the Hatay electorate was never reflected in Parliament in the form in which it came out of the ballot box.

When Erdoğan called on 1 October for a "civilian, libertarian constitution," a chair in Hatay's row in the same Parliament had been empty for three years. As we said at the beginning of this piece, the Parliament that was opened is not the counterpart of the people's will; the simplest proof of it is this.

Local Courts: the Judge Who Resists the Constitution Is Promoted

Refusing to recognise the decisions of the Constitutional Court was not only the Court of Cassation's work. Local courts also opened this road, and were rewarded for it.

The Enis Berberoğlu file is instructive from this point of view. The CHP deputy Berberoğlu was convicted on the claim that he had given the images of the National Intelligence Organisation lorries to a newspaper, and on 4 June 2020, on the same day as the HDP's Leyla Güven and Musa Farisoğulları, his deputyship was stripped by the reading in Parliament of the letter of conviction. On 17 September 2020 the Constitutional Court decided that Berberoğlu's right to be elected and his liberty of person had been violated, and that a retrial had to be held. The Istanbul 14th Heavy Penal Court, whose president was Akın Gürlek, did not implement the decision and refused the retrial (BirGün). After the Constitutional Court gave a violation ruling for the second time, in February 2021 the court this time complied with the decision (Medyascope).

What, then, happened to the judge who resisted the Constitutional Court? On 29 June 2021 the Council of Judges and Prosecutors promoted Akın Gürlek to first-class judgeship (Sözcü). In 2022 Gürlek became a Deputy Minister of Justice, then the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor; he conducted the İmamoğlu investigations. On 11 February 2026 he was also appointed Minister of Justice (Forbes Türkiye). He is also the name mentioned when, on the programme Bilanço, it was debated through which ministry channel the images of the Mersin operation were served to media close to the government.

A judge's career tells a constitution's real condition better than the articles on paper: resisting a decision of the Constitutional Court is, in Turkey today, a step in a career.

In a similar way, the deputyship of the HDP deputy Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu was stripped in March 2021 by a conviction given because of a social-media post; on 1 July 2021 the Constitutional Court gave a ruling of violation of rights, and this time the decision was implemented under intense public pressure, and Gergerlioğlu returned to his deputyship. The Constitutional Court later also found a violation in the detention of Leyla Güven. These examples show us this: whether decisions are implemented is not a legal but a political choice; and behind every decision that has to be implemented there is also a social pressure and a struggle.

Kavala and Demirtaş: Why Are the ECtHR Rulings Not Implemented?

Turkey and the ECtHR: a Short History

Turkey ratified the European Convention on Human Rights in 1954; but it accepted citizens' right of individual application to the ECtHR only in 1987, and the court's compulsory jurisdiction in 1990. These dates are not an accident: the application for membership of the European Community by the regime of 12 September (1987), and the need to integrate with European capital, required the acceptance of supervision of human rights.

From that day to this, Turkey is the country against which the ECtHR has given the most violation rulings. In the 1990s the files of village burnings, unsolved murders, disappearances in custody and torture; in the 2000s freedom of expression and the Hrant Dink case; and after 2016 the state-of-emergency dismissals, the ByLock rulings (the Grand Chamber's Yalçınkaya judgement of 26 September 2023), and the arrests of journalists and deputies, are the principal of these files.

The implementation of ECtHR judgements is supervised by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe. The heaviest instrument in the Committee's hand is the infringement procedure in the fourth paragraph of Article 46 of the Convention: the finding, by the ECtHR itself, that a state has not complied with an ECtHR judgement. This path has been used only twice in the history of the Council of Europe: Azerbaijan (Mammadov, 2019) and Turkey (Kavala, 2022).

Osman Kavala: Nine Years

1 November 2017: The businessperson and civil-society figure Osman Kavala was detained, and then arrested on the claim that he had "organised" the Gezi actions.
10 December 2019: The ECtHR decided that Kavala's detention did not rest on a reasonable suspicion, that its aim was to silence him and to deter human-rights defenders (Article 18 of the Convention: the use of restrictions of rights for other purposes), and asked that he be released at once.
18 February 2020: In the Gezi case Kavala and the other defendants were acquitted. After a decision of release was given, Kavala, without being able to leave the prison, was detained again the same day within the scope of another investigation related to the coup attempt of 15 July. That is, the ECtHR judgement was circumvented by the opening of a new file.
25 April 2022: In the Gezi case heard again after the acquittal was quashed, Kavala was sentenced to aggravated life imprisonment, and Can Atalay and the other defendants to 18 years each.
11 July 2022: The Grand Chamber of the ECtHR decided that Turkey, by not complying with the 2019 judgement, had violated Article 46 of the Convention.
28 September 2023: The Court of Cassation upheld the sentence of aggravated life imprisonment.
25 August 2026: The Grand Chamber of the ECtHR, in a second application, decided that six separate articles of the Convention had been violated, that the conviction had to be counted as null from the point of view of Convention law, and that Kavala should be released "at the earliest opportunity" (Medyascope).
The calendar: The Committee of Ministers asked Turkey for information about concrete steps by 14 October 2026; it will assess the matter at its meeting of 1–3 December 2026; it expects a new action plan for the structural problems by March 2027 (Karar).

Kavala is 69 today, and has been in prison for nine years.

Selahattin Demirtaş: Turning a Detainee into a Convict

20 May 2016: Parliament, with a provisional constitutional article aimed at HDP deputies, lifted their legislative immunity en masse. An important part of the CHP also said "yes" to this amendment.
4 November 2016: The HDP co-chairs Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ, together with many HDP deputies, were detained and arrested.
20 November 2018: The ECtHR decided that the length and the grounds of Demirtaş's detention were a violation, that the detention had the aim of suppressing pluralism and limiting political debate, and asked for his release.
30 November 2018: The court in Ankara refused the demand for release, on the grounds that the ECtHR judgement "had not become final."
4 December 2018: The appeal court upheld the sentence of 4 years and 8 months that Demirtaş had received because of his 2013 Newroz speech. Thus Demirtaş was counted not a "detainee" but a "convict," and the ECtHR's judgement on the detention was in practice emptied.
22 December 2020: The Grand Chamber of the ECtHR ruled definitively that the lifting of the immunities and the detention were politically motivated, and that Demirtaş had to be released at once.
16 May 2024: In the Kobani case Demirtaş was sentenced to 42 years in prison; Yüksekdağ and the other HDP officials also received heavy sentences.
8 July 2025: The ECtHR decided that Demirtaş's detention in the Kobani case too was being continued for political motives, and that he had to be released at once; Turkey's objection was rejected on 3 November 2025 and the judgement became final (Euronews).
15–17 September 2026: The Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe repeated the call for the "immediate release" of Demirtaş and Yüksekdağ; it asked Turkey whether the framework law adopted on 10 August ("the Law on Strengthening National Solidarity and Social Integration") would be applied to the applicants in the Demirtaş case; it asked for the political speeches of opposition deputies to be placed under constitutional guarantee, and for statistics on the summaries of proceedings on immunity. The file will be considered again in December 2026 (BoldMedya).
17 September 2026: The President's chief adviser Mehmet Uçum said that a new execution regulation was being prepared which took prison overcrowding (more than 440,000 convicts and detainees) as its ground, that if this regulation came out Demirtaş could apply, but that "the right to apply and a decision of release are different things" (Karar).

When Bahçeli's statements since 2025 that Demirtaş should "return to his home," the atmosphere of the peace process and the debates on a new execution regulation are thought of together, the picture that emerges is this: Demirtaş's freedom is being discussed not as a result of Article 90 of the Constitution or of the ECtHR judgement, but as the subject of a political bargain and of the government's discretion. The right has been turned into a favour. The constitution and the ECtHR judgement say "immediate release"; the government says "when the time comes, with a suitable formula."

A Catalogue of Methods: How Is the Constitution Circumvented?

When these files are set side by side, a repeating set of methods for rendering the constitution and international judgements ineffective emerges:

What the constitution and the law say	What is done in practice
Constitutional Court decisions are final and bind everyone (Art. 153)	The Court of Cassation does not comply with the decision, and files a criminal complaint against the members of the Constitutional Court (Atalay)
The local court holds a retrial on the Constitutional Court's violation ruling	The court resists, the resisting judge is promoted, then becomes a minister (Berberoğlu, Gürlek)
Complying with ECtHR judgements is the state's obligation (ECHR Art. 46, Constitution Art. 90)	At the moment the ECtHR says release, a new investigation is opened and the person is detained again (Kavala, 2020)
Detention is the exception; if the ECtHR has found a violation it ends	With the approval of the appeal court the "detainee" is turned into a "convict," and the judgement is emptied (Demirtaş, 2018)
An elected deputy has immunity (Art. 83)	The deputyship is stripped by the reading of the letter of conviction in the General Assembly; the Constitutional Court's decision of "null and void" is not implemented (Atalay, Berberoğlu, Güven, Farisoğulları)
The internal functioning of political parties belongs to democratic principles and to their own organs (Arts. 68–69)	A regional court of appeal counts a congress of two years earlier invalid by "absolute nullity" and changes the chair of the main opposition party (the CHP, 21 May 2026)
Decisions of detention must contain a concrete and individualised ground (Art. 19)	The ground of the previous hearing is copied and pasted, including the expression "judicial recess" (İmamoğlu and the espionage case, 29 September 2026)
The press is free and cannot be censored (Art. 28)	News sites and accounts are closed by unpublished access-blocking decisions (T24, September 2026)
There is no crime or punishment without law (Art. 38)	Dance figures in a music video enter an indictment as "an element of crime"

Every line in this table is the present counterpart of the finding Marx made for the constitution of 1848. But with one difference: in 1848 the marginal note that abolished freedom was in the constitution's own text ("regulated by law"). In Turkey today the marginal note is no longer even in the text; it is written directly in the court corridor, in the prosecutor's letter, in the ministry's WhatsApp group.

Ekrem İmamoğlu and Absolute Nullity: the Carrying of Politics into the Court

The greatest field of application of these methods today is the liquidation, by the path of law, of the main opposition and of its presidential candidate.

The mayor of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, Ekrem İmamoğlu, was detained and arrested on 19 March 2025, a few days before the primary at which he was to be determined as the CHP's presidential candidate. Since that day many cases and investigations have been opened. In the "espionage" case, at the fifth hearing on 29 September 2026, the detention of İmamoğlu, Hüseyin Gün, Necati Özkan and the journalist Merdan Yanardağ was continued. It emerged that the court's ground for detention had been written by copying the text of the previous hearing of 6 July, so much so that even the expression "judicial recess," which did not exist at the September hearing, remained in the text. The indictment does not even state to which state or intelligence organisation the information was given (Medyascope). The next hearing is on 23 December 2026.

The words "the one who put our presidential candidate in prison," which Özgür Özel said on 1 October while leaving the General Assembly in order not to listen to Erdoğan, refer to this file.

In the same process, on 21 May 2026 the 36th Civil Chamber of the Ankara Regional Court of Appeal counted the CHP's 38th Ordinary and 21st Extraordinary Congresses of 2023 null by "absolute nullity"; Kılıçdaroğlu was "returned" to the chair; the next day the Supreme Election Council unanimously rejected the CHP's objection (Euronews). The changing of a party's elected leadership by a court decision is a method to which even authoritarian regimes in the world rarely resort. We saw its result at the beginning of this piece: 91 deputies had to leave the party and found a new party, and the constitutional arithmetic changed.

This is the most vital point of the debate on a new constitution: when a power that cannot be changed by election acquires the possibility of determining its rivals by court decisions and of rearranging the composition of the opposition by the path of the judiciary, the writing of a constitution is no longer a free negotiation either.

Without Idealising the ECtHR: a Class Assessment

We must not fall into a mistake here. Defending the implementation of the ECtHR's judgements is not declaring the ECtHR, or the Council of Europe, the friend of the working class or of oppressed peoples.

The ECtHR is an institution founded by the bourgeois states of Europe. It applies the standards of the liberal state under the rule of law, that is, of an order founded on the basis of property and freedom of contract. In 2003 it found the closure of the Welfare Party, and in 2005, with the Leyla Şahin judgement, the ban on the headscarf in the universities, to be in conformity with the Convention; economic and social rights, for example the right to strike, it protects only in a limited way.
The Committee of Ministers is a political organ. Whether a sanction is applied to Turkey is determined according to Europe's interests in migration, energy, the defence industry and NATO relations. Concerns for human rights have always remained in second place against a government with which the European Union made a "migrant deal." Russia was expelled from the Council of Europe in 2022; for Turkey such a step was never seriously put on the agenda.
In the Kavala and Demirtaş files it is important that the ECtHR used Article 18 of the Convention, that is, the finding of "political motive"; but these judgements have not been implemented for nine years, and Europe's relations with Turkey have not changed.

The correct stance from a class point of view is this: we defend the implementation of the decisions of the ECtHR and of the Constitutional Court as proof that even the rules the bourgeois legal order itself laid down are being trampled. If the ruling class does not even comply with its own constitution, its own high court, the international treaties it has signed, this shows in the barest form that its law is an instrument of class. But we look for the guarantee of rights not in Strasbourg, but in Turkey's workplaces, its streets, its ballot boxes, in the power of the organised people. The restoration of Gergerlioğlu's deputyship, and the retrial of Berberoğlu, show that the decisions were implemented not of themselves but by the pressure of public opinion.

What Should Have Been the Constitution's Duty in These Situations?

A constitution's duty in situations of this kind can be summed up in three words: to limit, to protect, to bind.

To limit: To prevent political power from liquidating its opponents by the path of the judiciary. The immunity of elected representatives is, for this reason, not a privilege but the guarantee of the electorate's will.
To protect: To protect the individual against the arbitrary power of the state. That detention is the exception, that crimes and punishments are determined by law, the right to a fair trial.
To bind: That the decisions of the Constitutional Court and of ratified human-rights treaties bind all the organs of the state; and that non-compliance also has a concrete sanction.

Turkey's present Constitution writes these three functions on paper; but non-compliance has no sanction. No proceeding is taken against the chamber of the Court of Cassation that does not comply with a Constitutional Court decision, against the Speaker who does not implement the decision, against the local-court judge who resists; on the contrary, they are promoted.

For this reason the following guarantees should have a place in a programme of a labourers' constitution:

That non-compliance with the decisions of the Constitutional Court and of the ECtHR be openly counted as a violation of the constitution and an abuse of office, with personal liability and compensation for decisions that are not implemented.
The prohibition of the re-arrest, by a new file resting on the same facts, of a person for whom the ECtHR has given a release judgement.
That the last word in the stripping of a deputyship belong not to the General Assembly of Parliament and the Constitutional Court, but to the electorate: that a deputy can be removed from office only by a recall vote of the electorate in their own constituency.
That the Council of Judges and Prosecutors be founded independent of the executive and of the governing majority, with members elected by the judges and prosecutors themselves, and with the participation of professional organisations and the bar associations.
That intervention by court decision in the internal functioning of political parties be possible only on the application of the party's own members and on condition that the paths inside the party have been exhausted, and without changing the leadership.
That it be written openly that state-of-emergency and anti-terror legislation cannot be used for political expression, journalism and union activity.

But let us repeat: these guarantees too live only if there is an organised people that will keep them alive. Atalay's hunger strike is one person's resistance. The implementation of his decision depends on the earthquake labourers in Hatay, the Gezi generation, the unions and the bar associations coming onto the stage together.

The Link with Today's Debate: Who Is Targeting the Constitutional Court?

Let us close this section by tying it to the debate on a new constitution. The crisis that the Court of Cassation opened against the Constitutional Court in November 2023 was at once tied by the government to the agenda of a new constitution. Bahçeli proposed the closure or the restructuring of the Constitutional Court. The drafts that have leaked today do not yet carry clarity on the structure of the Constitutional Court and the scope of individual application; but the intentions of the government camp on this subject are open.

For this reason one of the first questions to be asked while looking at a new constitutional package is this: what happens to the Constitutional Court and to individual application? If the new text aims not at making the Constitutional Court's decisions unimplementable, but at making the Constitutional Court unable to give its decisions, this will be the constitutionalisation of the de facto situation. Can Atalay's empty chair in Parliament becomes the legal preamble of the new constitution.

Today: Why Does the AKP Want a New Constitution?

The Calendar and the Arithmetic

To understand today's debate, two articles have first to be known.

Article 101: A person may be elected President at most twice.

Article 116, third paragraph: If in the President's second term Parliament decides to renew the elections, the President may stand once more. For Parliament to take this decision, three-fifths of the full number of members is required, that is, 360 votes.

Erdoğan was elected by popular vote in 2014, and under the new system in 2018 and 2023. The government defended the 2023 candidacy with the interpretation that "the 2017 system reset the counter," and the Supreme Election Council accepted this. The opposition's interpretation is clear: in the words of the YENİ Party spokesperson Zeynel Emre, "According to our constitution, Mr Erdoğan's term of office has ended. It is two terms" (Gazete Kritik). In April Erdoğan said the election would be held "on time," that is, in May 2028. As Murat Yetkin wrote in those days, there is no way, with the present constitution, for Erdoğan to stand in an election held on time; either Parliament renews the election with 360 votes, or the constitution changes (Yetkin Report).

The numbers for a constitutional amendment (Article 175):

360 votes (three-fifths): The amendment goes to a referendum.
400 votes (two-thirds): The amendment is adopted directly (the President may still take it to a referendum).

According to the picture formed by the resignation from the CHP, in July 2026, of Özgür Özel and 91 deputies, in Parliament the AK Party has about 277, the YENİ Party 91, the DEM Party 56, the MHP 46, the CHP under Kılıçdaroğlu's leadership 44, the İYİ Party 29, Yeni Yol 20 deputies; HÜDA PAR and the New Welfare Party are represented by 4 each, TİP by 3, the EMEP and the DBP by 2 each (Euronews). Let us make a rough calculation:

The People's Alliance (the AKP, the MHP, HÜDA PAR and small allies): about 330. It cannot reach 360.
The People's Alliance plus the DEM Party: about 385. It passes 360, it cannot reach 400. That is, a constitutional amendment that will go to a referendum, or a decision to renew the election, is possible.
The People's Alliance plus the DEM Party plus Kılıçdaroğlu's CHP: about 430. It passes 400. There may not even be a need for a referendum.

Now read again Kurtulmuş's words, "467 votes are the key that will open every door." On 10 August 2026 the "Law on Strengthening National Solidarity and Social Integration," that is, the "framework law," was adopted by the votes of the AKP, the MHP, the DEM Party, the CHP, the YENİ Party leadership and DEVA, with 467 "yes" against 87 "no"; the İYİ Party and some YENİ Party deputies voted against (Medyascope). These votes, given for peace and disarmament, are being presented by the government as the rehearsal of a constitutional majority. The tying of the peace process to the constitutional process is the most disputed point of the process: if the Kurdish people's demand for equal citizenship and peace is put inside the same package as the solution of Erdoğan's candidacy problem, the demand for peace too is taken hostage.

What Has Leaked from the Drafts

Through 2026 various pieces of information about the drafts prepared in the government camp were reflected in the press:

According to the skeleton that the AKP's constitutional commission presented to Erdoğan in January 2026: the ending of the President's chairmanship of a party, the choosing of ministers from among the deputies, at most two vice presidents, the restriction of a decision for an early election taken shortly before an election, and narrowed electoral districts (BoldMedya).
According to what Nuray Babacan reported on Halk TV: a "40+1" threshold instead of "50+1" in the presidential election, an emphasis on "equal citizenship," and the aim of taking the DEM Party's support with provisions on democratic rights (Halk TV).
The MHP's proposal: the "giving of an institutional structure" to the presidential system, two vice presidents, the protection of the first four articles (soL).
According to Sedat Bozkurt's piece of 29 August 2026 in Kısa Dalga, there are at least four separate constitutional texts prepared in the Presidential Complex according to different possibilities of alliance (Kısa Dalga).

The claim of "four texts" shows that a constitution's content can change according to whose vote it will pass with. If a constitution is shaped not according to the people's need but according to which party will enter the bargain in Parliament with how many votes, this is not a social contract; it is a contract of power.

Why Now? Four Reasons

The first is candidacy. As we told above, with the present constitution Erdoğan cannot stand in 2028. A new constitution, as in Russia 2020, is the cleanest way of resetting the counter. "A new constitution, a new system, a new counting of terms."

The second is the 50+1 lock. The AKP itself founded the system of 2017; but today this system is also squeezing the AKP. In the polls of August 2026 the AKP appears at about 31.8 per cent, the YENİ Party at about 22.8 per cent (the figures Kısa Dalga reported). For 50+1 a broad alliance is needed, and every partner of this alliance asks a price. A 40+1 threshold reduces the need for an alliance.

The third is the reshaping of the municipalities and of the opposition. A reading that the presenters of the programme Bilanço, broadcast on the evening of 3 October, drew attention to is important here: the metropolitan municipalities lost in the 2024 local elections are being taken back step by step, by operations, arrests, trustees and passages from party to party. According to the examples given on the programme, the CHP's 187 members in the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipal Council have fallen to 154 by operations and passages, and the People's Alliance's 130 members have risen to 142; if a few more members cross, the council majority will change hands. The presenters interpreted, as parts of the same plan, the news in Yeni Şafak, a month before Vahap Seçer's detention in the dawn operation of 2 October, which put Seçer at the centre of the calculations for a new leadership in the CHP, the photograph of the mayor of İzmir Metropolitan Municipality, Cemil Tugay, at the Presidential Complex, and the Tunç Soyer case: to push the opposition's possible candidates out of the game one by one, and to enter the constitutional debate with an opposition that is weakened, divided, and in part drawn close to the palace. Not every detail of this reading is a confirmed fact, but its general direction coincides with the picture Mehmet Ali Güller pointed to in August as "an opening while thirty CHP mayors are under arrest" (Cumhuriyet).

The fourth is the crisis of legitimacy and the repair of hegemony. The fund scandal reached the government's own circle, the families of former ministers, and the son of Hayati Yazıcı, who was Erdoğan's lawyer for many years. No account can be given of the billions of lira transferred from public banks to networks of companies (Knowledge Commons, "Control for Capital, the Blast for Us"). As was reported on Bilanço, even names close to the government are sounding the alarm: at the reception for the opening of Parliament, Bülent Arınç said that if "the feeling of shame does not remain in people, they can do anything," and that if things go on like this the election will be lost; Mehmet Ocaktan wrote in Karar that "we set out with the dream of a pious generation, and we lost morality." It is exactly in such a period that the call for a "new constitution" is, in Gramsci's language, an attempt to found again a hegemony that is cracking. The agenda is pulled from the fund scandal, from workplace murders, from inflation, to a "great national consensus"; the opposition is threatened with the cost of opposing a "civilian constitution"; the government comes back onto the stage as the founding subject.

These four reasons work not separately but together. The call Erdoğan made in his opening speech, for a "Great Turkey Consensus" and for "consensus, not polarisation," serves on the one hand to draw part of the opposition to the table, and on the other to declare those who do not come to the table "irreconcilable," "tutelary."

Censorship and the Constitution in the Same Week

There is one more part of this picture. According to Bilanço, in September alone an access block or a closure decision was brought against 1,270 accounts and publications. On 29–30 September the 17-year-old T24 was shut down on the grounds of "LGBT propaganda"; the same day an access block was brought against at least 147 X accounts that were talking about the fund crisis (Knowledge Commons, "They Shut Down What They Cannot Buy"). The comedian Deniz Göktaş stayed under arrest for 88 days (Knowledge Commons, "The Deniz Göktaş Case and the Class of Humor"). The filming, with a police camera, of the moment a woman opened the door at night in the Mersin operation, and its serving to media close to the government, showed how, under the slogan "My family is safe," the state tramples the privacy of families.

On one side a call for a "civilian, libertarian constitution," on the other the closure of news sites. As Marx said of the constitution of 1848: freedom in the general sentence, a ban in the marginal note. Today the marginal notes are the government's own practice.

The Logic of the Omnibus Law: What Can Be Hidden in a Constitution?

What Is an Omnibus Law?

An "omnibus law" is the name given to bills that amend, at the same time, a large number of statutes that have nothing to do with one another. Inside one bill there can stand together a tax amnesty, a pensioner's bonus, a mining licence, olive-grove lands, a regulation of health personnel, and the rules of public procurement. In Turkey, in the AKP period, an important part of legislative activity was done by this method. Law no. 6111, passed in 2011 and known for the restructuring of public receivables, was a giant omnibus that amended dozens of statutes. The regulation that in July 2025 opened the way to mining in olive-grove lands (Law no. 7554) was also passed through Parliament inside an omnibus, together with other articles on energy legislation; the peasants resisting at Akbelen and in the olive groves of the Aegean were able to debate this article only after the law had come out.

The class function of the omnibus law can be summed up in three words: invisibility, speed, hostage.

Invisibility: While the public talks about the bonus to be given to the pensioner, no one sees the corporate-tax cut, or the loosening of environmental permits, in the same omnibus.
Speed: A text of hundreds of articles is passed in a few days in committee, in midnight sittings of the General Assembly. It is impossible for the opposition and the professional organisations to examine every article.
Hostage: The good articles become the hostage of the bad articles. An opposition deputy or a union cannot oppose the whole omnibus, in order not to have said "no" to the pensioner's bonus, or, when they do oppose it, they are declared "against the pensioner."

Why Can a Constitutional Package Turn into an Omnibus?

In constitutional amendments the referendum is held with a single "yes" or "no." The voter votes as a whole on a package that contains 20, 50 or 180 articles. In 2010, 26 articles, and in 2017, 18 articles, were voted with a single vote. This turns a constitutional package, by its nature, into an omnibus law.

As we saw in the example of Russia 2020, the pension and the minimum wage are put in the shop window, and the resetting of the counter at the bottom. For the new constitution being talked of in Turkey today, the shop window is also ready: "escaping the coup constitution," "a civilian constitution," "equal citizenship," "a strong Parliament," "the President's being without a party." Part of these headings are genuinely valuable demands; equal citizenship in particular, and the peaceful solution of the Kurdish question, are a hundred-year debt of Turkey. But the question that has to be asked is what is behind this shop window.

What Can Be Put at the Bottom of the Package

When the leaked drafts, the government's practice of recent years and the examples of authoritarian constitutionalism in the world are read together, the following headings have to be watched:

Resetting the counter: The interpretation that, with the passage to a new constitution, terms of office "begin again," or an open provisional article.
40+1: The President's being electable with 40 per cent of the votes. It means that someone whom 60 per cent of the people are against uses all the powers of the executive alone.
The making permanent of the executive's domination over the judiciary: The rearrangement of the election of the members of the Council of Judges and Prosecutors and of the Constitutional Court, of the "bindingness" of their decisions, and of the scope of individual application. The non-implementation of the Can Atalay decisions, and the Court of Cassation's criminal complaint against the Constitutional Court, formed a de facto ground in this direction.
New zones of prohibition through "the family" and "national and spiritual values": In the amendment proposal brought onto the agenda at the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023, there was the defining of marriage as "between a woman and a man," and the giving of a wide power to the state for the "protection" of the family. The proclamation of 2025 as the "Year of the Family," the closure of T24 on the grounds of "LGBT propaganda," and the prosecution of a music video, already show how freedom of expression and of organisation will be narrowed if these provisions enter the constitution. The same road was followed in Hungary and in Russia.
The emptying of secularism: It is said that the first four articles will not be touched; but the principle of secularism can be emptied in the other articles (education, the Directorate of Religious Affairs, the definition of freedom of belief).
Capital's guarantees: Provisions on privatisation and international arbitration, the narrowing of the "public interest" limits of the right of property, the tying of expropriation prices to market value, a status of "superior public interest" for mining and energy investments. These articles are never put at the centre of the public debate, but they are the most lasting parts of the constitution.
Not touching labour: In the debates on a new constitution, trade-union rights, strike bans and strike postponements are almost never talked about. Their not being talked about is also a choice: the class core of 1982 is carried into the new text, and what is more, legitimised with a "civilian" label.
The state of emergency and the powers of decree: The lesson of Weimar's Article 48; whether extraordinary powers are made permanent.

A Checklist: How Should a Constitutional Package Be Read?

When a text is put in front of us, without lingering on the articles in the shop window, let us look for answers to the following questions:

Who wrote it? A constituent assembly elected by the people, the palace, or the bargain of two or three parties behind closed doors?
What is in the provisional articles? (Resets of the counter, and immunities, are always hidden in the provisional articles.)
Do the right to strike, trade-union freedom and the right of collective bargaining widen, or narrow?
With which reservations are rights restricted? In how many places do the expressions "national security," "public morality," "family values" appear?
What happens to the executive's powers of decree, of the state of emergency, of appointment and of the budget?
Who guarantees the implementation of the Constitutional Court's decisions? Is the right of individual application protected, and what happens to the structure of the Constitutional Court and the election of its members? Is there a sanction for not complying with ECtHR judgements?
What do the provisions on privatisation, arbitration, property and expropriation say?
Are the demands of the Kurdish people and of all the peoples for equal citizenship and for the mother tongue really met, or are they a subject of bargaining?
Does the equality of women grow stronger, or do women and LGBT+ persons enter the state's supervision in the name of "the family"?

The Parties' Stances on the Constitution: Who Says What, and Why?

The parties' stances have to be read not only by what they say, but together with the class interests they represent and with their place in the parliamentary arithmetic.

The AKP: to Become the Founding Power

The AKP's discourse on the constitution has been the same since 2007: "to escape the coup constitution, to make a civilian constitution." At the end of 24 years the content of this discourse has changed. In 2007–2010, when "tutelage" was said, the army and the high judiciary were meant; today both the army and the judiciary are under the government's control. For this reason "tutelage" is now used to describe the opposition, the independent press, and institutions such as the bar associations and the professional organisations.

In class terms the AKP is the party of a section of capital that has grown intertwined with the state in construction, energy, finance and the defence industry, and of a religious-political network organised around it. The fund scandal showed the working of this structure in a bare form: the credits of the public banks, the funds of the capital market, the companies of ministers' children, all of them circulate inside the same network. What this section expects from the constitution is that the continuity of political power be guaranteed; because the source of the wealth is access to political power.

The MHP: in the Name of the Survival of the State

Since 2016 Bahçeli has been the strongest defender of the presidential system. It is also he who announces that his drafts are ready. It is also he who, by calling in October 2024 for Öcalan to speak in Parliament, started the process. The MHP's stance rests on the principle of "the survival of the state": to fortify the home front in the middle of regional wars and of Israel's expansionism, to disarm the Kurdish movement, and, while doing this, not to let the essence of the unitary state and of the definition of the "Turkish nation" be touched. His sending greetings to Öcalan on 1 October, through the DEM Party delegation, is also part of this line.

The YENİ Party: Defending the Spirit of the Constitution, Not Questioning the System

After Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu was "returned" to the chair by the decision of "absolute nullity" given in May 2026 on the CHP congress, Özgür Özel and 91 deputies resigned from the CHP on 24 July and founded the YENİ Party (Euronews). The YENİ Party is today the main opposition party.

Its stance can be summarised like this: it is against Erdoğan's standing again, it wants an early election, it opposes "methods that will circumvent the spirit of the constitution" (Murat Emir, 22 September 2026, BirGün). On 1 October, while Erdoğan was speaking, it left the General Assembly; in Özel's words: "We have no time to spend listening to someone who put our presidential candidate in prison." To the framework law, though, even while criticising the closed conduct of the process, it said "yes."

The YENİ Party's approach to the question of the constitution is essentially on the axis of "a return to the state under the rule of law," "a strengthened parliamentary system," and "the prevention of Erdoğan's candidacy." These demands are important, and they form a barrier against the government's present plans. But they have a class limit: the right to a union and to strike, public services, the provisions on privatisation and arbitration, the neoliberal constitutionalism of 1999, are not at the centre of this debate. Without facing the practices of subcontracting and de-unionisation in the municipalities under the CHP's administration, the demand for a "democratic constitution" cannot win a full credibility in the eyes of the labourers.

Kılıçdaroğlu's CHP: an Opposition Close to the Palace

The CHP under the leadership of Kılıçdaroğlu, returned to the chair by a court decision, is in Parliament with 44 deputies. On 1 October it did not leave the hall; it watched the sitting from the spectators' box. It said "yes" to the framework law. As was also debated on Bilanço, its reacting to the Vahap Seçer operation with "if they had called he would have come; why a dawn operation?" contradicts its stance during the İmamoğlu investigations. In the constitutional arithmetic these 44 deputies can be the key to the threshold of 400. Kurtulmuş's words, "467 opens every door," take this door into account too.

The DEM Party: at the Peace Table, in the Shadow of the Bargain

For years the DEM Party has wanted a new and democratic constitution: equal citizenship, education in the mother tongue, strong local administrations, the removal of a discriminatory definition of citizenship. These demands are the product of the Kurdish people's hundred-year struggle, and they are legitimate. It played the determining role in the adoption of the framework law; Tuncer Bakırhan said "we are closing the pages full of pain and denial."

The problem is the danger of the peace process being tied to the constitutional bargain, and of the constitutional bargain being tied to Erdoğan's candidacy. Aziz Tunç's piece of 27 September 2026 in Yeni Yaşam, a newspaper close to the DEM Party, while rejecting the claims of a "candidacy bargain," put forward this: Erdoğan does not need Kurdish support, because in the present conditions there is no democratic force that will prevent his being elected again (soL). This argument, while rejecting the bargain, at the same time accepts Erdoğan's continuity as a given. Peace should not be tied to the continuity of one person's power; otherwise both peace remains fragile, and the common struggle for democracy between the Kurdish and Turkish sections of the working class of Turkey weakens.

The İYİ Party: a Nationalist "No"

The İYİ Party opposed the framework law at every stage, and argued that the bill was contrary to the constitution (Medyascope). The party under Müsavat Dervişoğlu's leadership says it will "struggle to the end" against a constitutional amendment that will serve Erdoğan's political future. This "no" is built on the protection of the first four articles and of the unitary structure, through a denialist line on the Kurdish question. From the point of view of opposing Erdoğan's candidacy it can form a barrier to the government, but it does not offer a democratic alternative for the labourers and the Kurdish people.

Yeni Yol, the Felicity Party, and the Others

The Yeni Yol group formed by DEVA, the Future Party and the Felicity Party (20 deputies) defends a return to a strengthened parliamentary system; it supported the framework law. These parties are the voice of the liberal-conservative sections that broke from the AKP. In the constitutional process they can stand close to the opposition in the demands for a "state under the rule of law," and close to the government on "national and spiritual values."

The Left, the Socialist Parties, and the Unions

TİP, the EMEP, the SOL Party, the TKP and the other socialist formations have long argued that the AKP has no legitimacy to make a constitution. In 2021 the SOL Party said of the AKP's constitutional initiative that "the AKP no longer has the legitimacy to make a constitution," and called on the opposition to stand together against this initiative (Cumhuriyet). In Parliament TİP has 3 deputies and the EMEP 2; numerically they are not determining in the constitutional arithmetic, but this is the only political vein that can bring the class's questions into the debate.

Labour and professional organisations such as DİSK, KESK, the Union of Chambers of Turkish Engineers and Architects and the Turkish Medical Association presented, in the process of the Reconciliation Commission of 2011–2013, their proposals containing the removal of strike bans, an order of trade-union rights in conformity with ILO Conventions 87 and 98, a right of collective bargaining with a strike for public employees, and the strengthening of the social state. These proposals should be brought onto the agenda again today, updated.

The weakness of the left and socialist movement in this debate also has to be said openly: the constitutional debate mostly runs on the axis of "yes–no" and of "a front against Erdoğan"; the working class's own constitutional demands (the strike, the union, public service, property, secularism, popular sovereignty) cannot be carried to the masses as an independent programme. After the destructive lesson of "not enough, but yes" in 2010, contenting oneself today with "no to Erdoğan" is a separate trap. Because a 2017 system without Erdoğan, or a 1982 constitution without Erdoğan, is not the working class's constitution either.

Parties and Class: a Summary Table

The question of the bloc of power and of the opposition of the order	The class's question
Will Erdoğan be able to stand again?	A constitution written by whom, for whom?
The presidency, or a strengthened parliamentary system?	Will the right to strike, trade-union freedom, collective bargaining widen?
50+1, or 40+1?	Will the people be able to recall those they elect?
Will the first four articles be protected?	Will secularism and equal citizenship be guaranteed for all the peoples?
Who is "tutelage"?	What will happen to the tutelage of capital, that is, privatisation, arbitration and the debt order?
Who will sit at the table, who will stay outside?	Will the table be set in the palace, or in the workplaces and the neighbourhoods?

Our Stance: Towards a Programme of a Labourers' Constitution

Dear Young Comrades,

In this piece we saw that constitutions are written above, inside palaces and parliaments, but that their history is determined below, in the factories, the fields, the streets. Article 39 of Magna Carta widened when the Levellers took it in hand. The right to strike of 1961 gained meaning when the Kavel workers and the hundreds of thousands of 15–16 June used it in the street. The right to work of the Soviet constitution of 1936 was real because there was a planned economy behind it. The "not enough, but yes" of 2010, by contrast, was a settling of accounts not of the people but of the rulers among themselves; and its end was the same.

In today's debate neither "the status quo of 1982" nor "Erdoğan's constitution" is our side. Our side is the labourers' carrying their own demands, with their own organisations, to the centre of this debate.

The Main Lines of a Labourers' Constitution

A labourers' constitution should contain at least the following principles:

Popular sovereignty should be real: A constituent assembly freely elected by the people; the recall of elected representatives; the removal of electoral thresholds; an end to the system in which all powers are gathered in one person.
The right to strike should be unconditional: Strike bans and strike postponements should be removed; the right to the general strike, the solidarity strike and the political strike should be recognised; a right of collective bargaining with a strike for public employees.
Trade-union freedom: Organisation in the workplace and in the branch without a threshold; the prohibition of dismissal because of union activity, and a guarantee of reinstatement; worker status for platform, courier, computing and all precarious labourers.
The material guarantee of rights: Housing, health, education, transport and clean water should be guaranteed not as declarations of intent of the kind "the state watches over," but as public and free services. Those who have no press have no freedom of the press; those who have no dwelling have no right of family.
Public property and the commons: Water, land, mines, energy, data and the commons of knowledge should be counted as the people's common wealth; the provisions on privatisation and international arbitration written into the constitution in 1999 should be removed.
Secularism: The constitutional status of the Directorate of Religious Affairs and of the compulsory religion lesson should be removed; the state should stand at an equal distance from all beliefs and from those without belief.
Equal citizenship: A definition of citizenship that does not rest on ethnic origin; the right to education and to public service in the mother tongue; the constitutional guarantee of a peaceful and democratic solution of the Kurdish question.
The equality of women and of LGBT+ persons: Open guarantees against the restriction of individuals' freedom in the name of "the family"; the socialisation, by public services, of women's domestic and care labour.
A limit on extraordinary powers: The narrowing of the powers of the state of emergency and of decree, and the protection, in these periods too, of fundamental rights and of judicial review.
The independence of the judiciary and the bindingness of decisions: That non-compliance with the decisions of the Constitutional Court and of the ECtHR be counted as an open violation of the constitution and an abuse of office.

Concrete Tasks

Let us read, and have others read: Read together, in a reading group, Articles 2, 10, 24, 26, 33, 34, 51–54, 101, 104, 116, 119–121, 125, 136 and 175 of the present Constitution. Apply to every article the method of "a right in the general sentence, a ban in the marginal note."
Let us read every leaked draft with the checklist: Turn the questions above into a table; whenever a new draft or statement comes, fill it in and share it.
A conversation on the constitution in the workplace: In your union, your association, your student collective, organise small meetings under the heading "what does the constitution say about the right to strike?" For a worker the most concrete article of the constitution is Article 54.
A call to the organisations of labour: Ask DİSK, KESK, the professional chambers and the independent unions to update the constitutional proposals they presented in 2011–2013 and to form a common platform of a "labour constitution."
Separate peace from the candidacy bargain: Claim the Kurdish people's demand for equal citizenship and peace; but build an open language against the tying of this demand to the continuity of one person's power.
Solidarity against censorship: Keep alive, in the commons (archives, open copies, RSS), the content of the publications that are closed and of the accounts that are blocked. The first condition of the constitutional debate is the freedom to be able to debate.
Organise locally: While municipal councils and city councils change hands, neighbourhood assemblies and people's committees are the most concrete field of experience for the constitutional guarantee of local democracy.
Preparation for a referendum: If a referendum comes, the preparation of an independent class campaign, which, without being squeezed between the "yes" and "no" fronts, will tell the programme of a labourers' constitution with its own campaign, should begin today.

Is the Constitution a Scrap of Paper?

According to Lassalle, a constitution that does not correspond to the actual relations of power is a scrap of paper. The reverse of this is also true: in the hand of an organised class, even a scrap of paper can turn into a weapon. Magna Carta is this, 1961 is this, and the Soviet constitutions of 1918 and 1936 are the greatest examples of this.

Today in Turkey a handful of people, in the palace, are writing four separate constitutions with four different calculations of alliance. We will write the fifth. Not on paper first, but in the workplaces, the neighbourhoods, the schools; in one another's lives. Putting it on paper afterwards is easy.

The class's constitution is the class's organisation.

For better days, all together.

Sources

Current developments

The files of the judiciary, the Constitutional Court and the ECtHR

Related pieces from Knowledge Commons

Constitutional texts and history

The Constitution of the Republic of Turkey (1982, current text), the Grand National Assembly, especially Articles 26, 51–54, 101, 116, 125, 153 and 175.
The Kanun-ı Esasi of 1876, the Laws on Fundamental Organisation of 1921 and 1924, the Constitution of 1961: Suna Kili and A. Şeref Gözübüyük, Turkish Constitutional Texts, Türkiye İş Bankası Cultural Publications.
Bülent Tanör, Ottoman-Turkish Constitutional Developments (1789–1980), Yapı Kredi Publications.
Magna Carta (1215), the English Bill of Rights (1689), the US Constitution (1787), the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), the French Constitution of 1793, the Mexican Constitution of 1917, the Weimar Constitution of 1919, the Italian Constitution of 1947, the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany of 1949.
The Constitution of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (10 July 1918) and the Constitution of the USSR (5 December 1936); for the 1936 text, the Bucknell University archive and Seventeen Moments in Soviet History; J. V. Stalin, the report "On the Draft Constitution of the USSR", 25 November 1936.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948); the International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966).

Theoretical sources

Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) and The Class Struggles in France (1850).
Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871).
Ferdinand Lassalle, Über Verfassungswesen (On the Essence of the Constitution), 1862.
V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917) and The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918).
Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks.
Charles Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913).
Stephen Gill, "New Constitutionalism, Democratisation and Global Political Economy," Pacifica Review, 1998.

Tags:#constitution #law #parliament#socialcontract#class #democracy #12september #turkey

Whose Contract Is the Constitution?

A Class History for Young Comrades, from Magna Carta to the Soviet Constitutions, from the Kanun-ı Esasi to the AKP's "Civilian Constitution"

Whose Contract Is the Constitution?

A Class History for Young Comrades, from Magna Carta to the Soviet Constitutions, from the Kanun-ı Esasi to the AKP's "Civilian Constitution"

The Situation in Brief: What Is Happening, and What Does This Piece Tell?

First the Concept: What a Constitution Is, and What It Is Not

Lassalle's Scrap of Paper

Marx's Reading of the 1848 Constitution

Constitution and Class Struggle: Three Theses

The History of the Constitution in the World: From Magna Carta to Today

Magna Carta (1215): the Barons' Contract

The English Revolutions and the 1689 Bill of Rights

The American Constitution (1787): the Republic of Property

The French Revolution: the Declaration of 1789, 1791 and 1793

1848: Revolutions, Constitutions, and the First Workers' Demands

The Paris Commune (1871): Not a Constitution, a New Form of State

The Mexican Constitution of 1917: the First Social Constitution

The Soviet Constitutions: the First Constitutions Written by the Working Class

The RSFSR Constitution of 1918: "He Who Does Not Work, Neither Shall He Eat"

The USSR Constitution of 1936: the Constitution of Social Rights

A Marxist Assessment of the 1936 Constitution

The Lessons That Remain from 1918 and 1936

Weimar (1919): Social Rights and Article 48

After the Second World War: the Welfare State and the Cold War Compromise

Neoliberal Constitutionalism: When the Market Is Written into the Constitution

Constituent Assemblies in Latin America, and Chile's Lesson

Authoritarian Constitutionalism: Hungary and Russia

Constitutions in the World: Who Wrote Them, Whom Did They Protect?

The History of the Constitution in Turkey: Constitutions the People Did Not Write

From the Tanzimat to the Kanun-ı Esasi: Reform from Above

The Kanun-ı Esasi of 1876: the Constitution the Sultan Suspended

1908–1909: the Second Constitutional Period

The Teşkilât-ı Esasiye of 1921: the Constitution of the Liberation War

The Teşkilât-ı Esasiye of 1924: the Constitution of the Republic

The Coup of 1960 and the Constitution of 1961: the Door the Coup Opened

12 March (1971) and the Constitutional Amendments of 1971–1973

12 September 1980 and the Constitution of 1982: the Constitution of a Class Coup

The Amendments of the 1982 Constitution: a Text Rewritten Almost Entirely in Forty Years

A Table: the Shop Window and the Underside of the Amendments of the AKP Period

The Constitution's Present Condition: a Text That Has Been Suspended

What Does the Constitution Say? Four Basic Provisions

"I Neither Comply Nor Feel Respect": the Story of a Sentence

The Can Atalay File: the Court of Cassation's Blow against the Constitution

Local Courts: the Judge Who Resists the Constitution Is Promoted

Kavala and Demirtaş: Why Are the ECtHR Rulings Not Implemented?

Turkey and the ECtHR: a Short History

Osman Kavala: Nine Years

Selahattin Demirtaş: Turning a Detainee into a Convict

A Catalogue of Methods: How Is the Constitution Circumvented?

Ekrem İmamoğlu and Absolute Nullity: the Carrying of Politics into the Court

Without Idealising the ECtHR: a Class Assessment

What Should Have Been the Constitution's Duty in These Situations?

The Link with Today's Debate: Who Is Targeting the Constitutional Court?

Today: Why Does the AKP Want a New Constitution?

The Calendar and the Arithmetic

What Has Leaked from the Drafts

Why Now? Four Reasons

Censorship and the Constitution in the Same Week

The Logic of the Omnibus Law: What Can Be Hidden in a Constitution?

What Is an Omnibus Law?

Why Can a Constitutional Package Turn into an Omnibus?

What Can Be Put at the Bottom of the Package

A Checklist: How Should a Constitutional Package Be Read?

The Parties' Stances on the Constitution: Who Says What, and Why?

The AKP: to Become the Founding Power

The MHP: in the Name of the Survival of the State

The YENİ Party: Defending the Spirit of the Constitution, Not Questioning the System

Kılıçdaroğlu's CHP: an Opposition Close to the Palace

The DEM Party: at the Peace Table, in the Shadow of the Bargain

The İYİ Party: a Nationalist "No"

Yeni Yol, the Felicity Party, and the Others

The Left, the Socialist Parties, and the Unions

Parties and Class: a Summary Table

Our Stance: Towards a Programme of a Labourers' Constitution

The Main Lines of a Labourers' Constitution

Concrete Tasks

Is the Constitution a Scrap of Paper?

Sources

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