Another moment of destiny for Turkey

The referendum on April 16 will mark another turning point or, rather, crossroads in Turkey's political history.

Voters will choose whether to consolidate all executive power in presidential hands and allow the president to also lead his or her party in parliament and, at the same time, be able to appoint the majority of the Constitutional Court's judges and members of the board to appoint judges and prosecutors across the country - or continue with the current system which is a pseudo-parliamentarian one that has been the source of complaints for decades but has more room to maneuver for checks and balances.

Since the presidential election in 2007, President Tayyip Erdoğan has been pushing for such an executive presidential system in order to "unchain" the executive potential of the governments which represent the "will of people" through elections from the "obstructive effects" of the parliament and the judiciary.

The spirit of national unity formed after the foiled military coup attempt on July 15, 2016, might have inspired Erdoğan that the correct time to make the move had arrived. The state of emergency imposed right after the coup attempt not only crushed the secret network and sympathizers of his former ally, Fethullah Gülen, the U.S.-resident Islamist preacher accused of masterminding the coup, but also the network of the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) - which focuses on the Kurdish issue - in the parliament; thousands of party officials are in jail, including co-chairs Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ.

Because the Justice and Development's (AK Parti) seats in parliament were not enough to take such a constitutional shift to the public vote and because social democratic opposition Republican People's Party (CHP)...