Best columns: Turkey: Can secularist judges rein in the ruling party?

The simmering antagonism between Turkey’s secular establishment and Islamist members of Parliament from the ruling AKP party is about to reach a boiling point, said Oktay Eksi in Turkey’s Hurriyet. Last week, the Constitutional Court—custodians of the secularist constitution enacted by the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Ataturk—blocked a law that would have allowed female university students to wear head scarves, in keeping with Islamic convention. It was a clear sign that the court will also rule against the AKP in a forthcoming case charging the party with fostering anti-secular activity. Once that happens, the party may have to disband and the AKP leader, Prime Minister Recep Tayipp Erdogan, could be barred from political office for five years. The secularists are jubilant: They have long accused the AKP of trying to create an Islamic state by stealth. But Erdogan and his followers are incensed.

Privately, officials are already resigned to the AKP’s being banned, said Murat Yetkin in Turkey’s Radikal, though that doesn’t necessarily mean the party is finished. Its members simply plan to re-establish the AKP under a different name and appoint a puppet leader. However, this strategy has been tested by other parties in similar situations and has never succeeded.

Friends of Turkey should be deeply worried, said Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung in an editorial. What we’re witnessing is a slow “putsch”—conducted by judges rather than by army officers—that spells the end of moves to greater democracy and closer ties to Europe. It’s typical of the secular elite, which treats the state as its property and the people as merely an “ignorant mass.” But the AKP has itself to blame for forcing through controversial reforms without bothering to provide reassurances to its opponents, said Burak Bekdil in the Turkish Daily News. And its clumsy reaction to the crisis is only stirring up further resentments: Militants are calling on Allah to rain down punishments on the infidel judges, thus convincing secularists that their worst fears are justified.

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I can’t understand why Euro­peans would rush to defend the likes of Prime Minister Erdogan, said Michael Rubin in The Wall Street Journal. An autocrat in the mold of ex–Russian President Vladimir Putin, Erdogan has tried to undermine both the judiciary and civil service by packing them with party apparatchiks; he has sued more journalists than any previous leader and forced the sale of key media outlets to business cronies. He pays lip service to the European Union, which Turkey hopes to join, but has shown contempt for its institutions, by insisting, for instance, that only Muslim clerics are qualified to adjudicate human rights in Turkey. Under the AKP, women are especially beleaguered, said Zeyno Baran in the International Herald Tribune. Pressured to uphold traditional mores, fewer women are working outside customarily female fields. And cases of sexual harassment are increasingly blamed on the women themselves for not dressing modestly enough. The secularists may be authoritarian, but in their own way Erdogan’s lot have turned out little better.