Mülkiye Dergisi

Abstract

Bahri Savci is one of the intellectuals who have made very important contributions to Turkey's political thought life. He graduated from Ankara University, Faculty of Political Sciences, in 1936. In 1942, he started to work as an assistant at the same faculty. Savci, who became a professor in 1954, was also a member of the commission that prepared the 1961 Constitution. In order for a pluralist and democratic political life envisaged by the 1961 Consti-tution to be realized in all dimensions, he advocated changing the socio-economic conditions in favor of the wor-king people in a leftist line. He considered such a change as a constitutional requirement, claiming that the consti-tution had a quality that was open to the left and even to socialism. Like the 1961 Constitution, he established a connection between Kemalism and the left and argued that Mustafa Kemal's revolutionism approved an economic and social transformation in the socialist understanding. He considered the dominance of those who did not have economic power, whom he claimed to be excluded from the political and economic system until the 1960s, over political and economic power as the natural and ultimate result of the Constitution and Kemalism. He argued that the Justice Party (AP), which came to power alone with the General Elections of October 10, 1965, claiming that it acted on behalf of all social segments with a wrong interpretation of the concept of national will, assumed an atti-tude against the pluralistic and democratic nature of the Constitution. He argued that despite the claim that the AP represents all segments of society, it acted in the opposite direction with the economic policy it implemented. He stated that with the discourse of economic development, it clearly contradicted the nature of the Constitution that foresaw to develop people socio-economically by favoring the landowners in underdeveloped regions which were predominantly feudal, on one hand, and large capital owners who were economically dependent on foreign co-untries, on the other hand. Thus, he emphasized that the Demirel Government prevented the segments of the society in poverty from becoming a subject politically as well as leaving them out of the system economically. By drawing attention to the social fluctuation that developed towards the late 1960s, he stated that a political and socioeconomic structure in which low-income segments of the society would be dominant was inevitable and unp-reventable.