Politics & Power Quote by Ahmet Necdet Sezner

Democracy, here, is not treated as a national identity to be celebrated but as infrastructure to be installed before the building collapses. Ahmet Necdet Sezer’s phrasing - “shouldn’t waste any more time” - carries the impatient cadence of a warning: whatever legitimacy the state claims is on a clock, and delay is itself a political risk. The line also telegraphs a particular kind of anxiety common to systems that have elections but not always liberal guarantees: the fear that procedure without guardrails becomes a revolving door for arbitrary power.

Sezer pairs “democracy” with “the supremacy of the law” as if they’re co-dependent, not interchangeable. That’s deliberate. It’s an argument against majoritarian shortcuts and, just as pointedly, against the state’s habit of treating law as an instrument rather than a restraint. “Properly rooted” implies something has been planted but hasn’t taken: democratic forms exist, but they can be uprooted by institutional reflexes - military tutelage, emergency governance, party bans, or executive overreach. In Turkey’s late-1990s/early-2000s climate, with coalition instability, tensions over secularism and political Islam, and the gravitational pull of EU accession reforms, “rule of law” wasn’t a civics slogan; it was a battleground.

The most revealing phrase is “integral part of our state’s structure.” Sezer is speaking like a constitutional lawyer in the presidency’s moral register, trying to hard-code restraint into the machinery of government. The subtext: if the state doesn’t bind itself, it will keep reaching for exceptions - and exceptions, in Turkish political history, have a way of becoming the rule.