Recently, the people of Turkey voted on an important issue: Should the country’s president get more power or not? Two of our reporters in Istanbul tell us more and comment on what the vote might mean.
April 16th 2017 Turkey voted on a referendum to decide the future powers of President Reccip Tayyip Erdogan. People were voting about if they wanted President Erdogan to have full executive power (which means he can make more decisions himself, without having to convince other people first). This was an important world event because Erdogan’s decisions can affect citizens of other countries too.
In Turkey we voted if we want Reccip Tayyip Erdoğan to have full executive power over the country. Based on this fact some people in the news media have called him a “dictator”. In our opinion if Erdoğan takes full power over Turkey, and makes all the choices on his own, then he might choose wrong.
This graph shows the number of votes people gave. You can see that it was a pretty even result.
|
Votes |
% |
Yes (we want Erdoğan to win) |
25,157,025 |
51.41% |
No (we don’t want him to win) |
23,777,091 |
48.59% |
z
Image source : https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Turkish_constitutional_referendum_2017.png
Red- No
Green-Yes
The vote was simply between “Evet” Yes and “Hayir” No. Those voting Hayir, were in favor of maintaining the parliamentary system. While those voting Evet, wanted to give Erdoğan executive presidency in certain situations which means he will have more direct power over Turkey. Some people voted yes because of the positive decisions Erdogan has made in the past, and others because of what he says he will do in the future.
Now that he has full executive power we feel like he might be less open to the ideas of others. We can already see some changes such as the banning of Wikipedia and less social media. Twitter might possibly be banned in the future. Would you have voted Evet or Hayir?
By: Tala and Gulabe