Remolding Compulsory Education, the AKP Erases a Secularist Legacy – and Seeks to Check the Gulen Brotherhood
By M. Kemal Kaya and Halil M. Karaveli (vol. 5, no. 7 of the Turkey Analyst)
The passage of the bill that remolds compulsory education in Turkey erases the legacy of the secularist military intervention fifteen years ago. But although the move of the government of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) ideologically reverses the intervention in 1997, in tactical terms it replicates it. It deploys a similar tactic to check the influence of a power challenger. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has taken on both the secularist constituency and the Gülenist part of the Islamic constituency. It may be that new political alliances, like the ones that were once triggered by the military, besides further strife, are what the future has in store for Turkey.
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