This week, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared that if consensus can't be reached by March with Turkey's other major parties, his governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) would take its own constitutional draft directly to a referendum. This announcement has given his critics ammunition to claim that Turkey's new constitution would be an "AKP Constitution."

Turkey's current charter was prepared in 1982 under the auspices of a brutal military junta. Although subsequent civilian governments have introduced dozens of amendments, including some encouraged by the European Union, the illiberal sprit of the constitution has remained. Replacing it with a "civilian constitution" has long been the dream of Turkey’s liberals.

However, more tangible efforts towards a new constitution came from not the liberals, but rather from Erdogan's "conservative" AKP. There are two key reasons: Like the liberals, AKP also dissented from the old Kemalist regime and hoped to build "a more democratic republic." But unlike the liberals, AKP cultivated a huge political mandate and won the majority of seats in parliament.

AKP's first effort came right after the 2007 elections, when the party won an impressive 46 percent of the vote. Erdogan personally asked a group of academics, led by prominent liberal-democrat Ergun Ozbudun, to prepare a constitutional draft. The team produced a text which was unmistakably more liberal and democratic then the current draft, but the project picked up dust during the political turmoil of that era.