Next: the Constitutional Court opposition

The AYM President, in a speech yesterday on the anniversary of the Court's founding, made unmistakable a stance whose signs he had given on various earlier occasions. This stance, now made clear, is the AYM President's categorical opposition to Erdoğan.

While stating that he is a party to the debates continuing in Turkey, Kılıç, in a way, put on a veritable show of strength that the Court too is at his command in this partisanship. His speech from beginning to end was less a legal text than a simple performance of opposition to the government on all controversial issues.

This challenge also embraced all the controversial decisions the AYM has handed down so far. For in theory, for example, since the Twitter case was not a case he himself was hearing, he should have been independent even of the decision that came out, and, before this result, he, like everyone else, should have stood at a distance.

In fact, he had earlier defended this decision as if he himself had made it, but he showed once again that he has appropriated the cases on the Court's docket. To be sure, in recent times a sufficiently clear oppositional inclination had been visible in these cases. With yesterday's speech the President practically turned the Court's 52nd founding anniversary into a ceremony of joining the political stage as an opposition party.

"Independence of the law" presumably means that judges are independent not only of politicians but also, as regards the decisions they make, of the interference of their presidents.

But it is worth recalling that this independence does not mean that jurists are independent of the law too. On the contrary, jurists must be subject to the law more than anyone else. Unfortunately, this is the point in Turkey that can never be got past or understood. The independence of the law seems to be understood as granting the jurist a field in which he can easily enter the bounds of arbitrariness.

It is all well and good that the AYM president defines the law as limiting the government's arbitrary practices, but who will protect the people against the power that the jurist recklessly produces and uses? Who will limit the jurist who, taking the supremacy of the law as the supremacy of the jurist, attempts to wield a power the law does not recognize?

Throughout its 52-year history the AYM has repeatedly displayed its skill at producing, by presenting faits accomplis through its decisions, powers that the laws did not grant it. From the headscarf decision to the 367 decision, all the decisions the AYM took were decisions in which the AYM expanded its own power by defining it itself.

After the 12 September Referendum it was assumed that a measure had been taken against this, but recent developments tell us that the office itself has a tempting and corrupting side.

The AYM president cannot refrain from exercising a power that the office imagines for itself, and puts himself in opposition to the politicians. The feeling that seized earlier AYM presidents seizes him too, and from the principle of the supremacy of law he assigns himself a share of being hierarchically superior to everyone. Thus, as one of the most democratic jurists in our political history, he ends up reproducing the tutelarism that the robe inspires. If the issue is the robe, it is worth rethinking that too, of course.

Unfortunately there is no way of overseeing the AYM, whose decisions are binding, other than public scrutiny and criticism. That is why it is another oddity that the AYM is disturbed by criticism of its decisions and practices, which in recent times have been taken almost like performing prayer without ablution. Even though AYM decisions are binding, they are not beyond criticism. Especially an AYM that has become this politicized must by now be prepared to face every kind of political criticism.

In one respect, when the political opposition leaves so many gaps, many will come to its aid. It was known that the CHP has never come to power without support from the army or other tutelary institutions. What is tragic is the ends in political life of these helpers, each time bearing the nature of a political match-fixing.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's political life is like a museum of political corpses telling of the tragic ends of the actors who, in particular, entered into such political match-fixing against him. These cautionary tales should be instructive enough for those who can draw a lesson. No one who came up against him with these political match-fixings has prospered.

Unfortunately, none of these cautionary stories is warning enough all the same. Each actor, when his turn comes, enters the stage against Erdoğan as if playing a script written for him, knowing his own end. The performance of each actor serves nothing other than to increase Erdoğan's popularity among the people and make him stronger still.

We have all seen and lived it together. No one who came up against him with great fanfare has had a very long political life. Many of those who came up against him with great pomp, no one even remembers their names.

Of course, what is even more tragic is the identities, making one say "you too?", of those who stand against him now.