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Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called an emergency meeting June 6 of the ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party to discuss how to proceed after the party suffered a major legal defeat in the Constitutional Court on June 5. Some AK members have suggested responding by dissolving the government and holding snap elections, less than a year after the party took 47 percent of the vote in national elections in July 2007.
The case — in which the high court repealed an AK-sponsored constitutional amendment that had lifted a ban on the Islamic headscarf in universities — is one prong of a power struggle between the Islamist-rooted AK Party and Turkey’s ultrasecular Kemalist establishment, which is centered in unelected institutions such as the military, judiciary, bureaucracy and academia.
The other prong is a still-pending case that would outlaw the AK Party on the grounds that it threatens the secular nature of the Turkish state. It remains unclear how the court will decide in that case, but the 9-2 decision in the headscarf case shows that the judiciary is not inclined to be friendly or lenient toward the party.
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