THE WINNER IS TURKEY

AK Party won a clear victory by getting 49.92 % of the votes in 24th Term General Parliamentary Elections on 12 June 2011. The ruling party restored trust by getting one out of every two votes in the elections in which the opposition parties CHP and MHP got respectively 25.94% and 12.99% while the independent candidates got 6.59% of the votes.

In respect of the issue, the Minister for EU Affairs and Chief Negotiator Egemen Bagis said: "The winner is democracy, the winner is Turkey and the winner is the national will."

Bagis attended the TV Programme "Secim 2011" broadcasted live on CNN Turk TV and evaluated the results of the election. Bagis answered the questions on the forthcoming process and said:

"I hope everyone gets this message and from tomorrow on we should work together for the development of Turkey and to make Turkey one of the world's top ten economies, achieve the 2023 vision about which we talked in the public squares during the election campaign and reach the level of modern civilizations which was set as a target by Ataturk; because there is no other Turkey.

It should be a common denominator for everyone to empower this country, reach an advanced democracy standard and present our citizens a country in which we bring up our children more safely.

Our nation gave a very clear message and I believe we should altogether perceive that message well."

Minister Bagis stated that the nation had asked them to collaborate in the Parliament and respect the national will."

Upon a question on what is extremely vital for Ak Party with regard to the new constitution issue, Bagis said that it must be "the constitution of the nation" and continued as follows:

"We don't want this country to be administered by the status quo any more. It is now time to have a constitution which really constitutes a state structure to be at peace with the citizens, which does not marginalize any person in the country, and does not make any kind of discrimination but embrace everybody. We haven't had a civil constitution until today. There have always been military constitutions prepared under military domination. Democracy occurred at minimum level with those constitutions and in some periods it did not occur at all. However it is now time to have a constitution which embraces every individual in this country. A constitution which does not deal with details but accepted by everybody would open new ways to this country. This is very important for Turkey's EU accession process. We witnessed that Portugal, Greece and Spain accelerated the EU accession process after they had adopted a civilian constitution. That is why we understand today that the negative power which pulled Turkey back

like a magnet during its progress towards EU membership which has been continuing for 52 years is the present constitution.

Just because of this I am very hopeful. I hope the opposition parties keep their promises which they made at public squares and make cooperation with the government on the preparation of the new constitution and we do that all together."