The Parliament has fulfilled its duty, now the administration is being watched closely. Turkey's agenda should be composed of unemployment and economic performance.

Turkey is an interesting country. Do you know the Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times"? The case here in Turkey is just the same. Just when you are thinking that nothing will happen until the end of the elections and that no reforms will be initiated until 2015, a step in the right direction comes. Thank God not all surprises are bad. The nice surprise of the recent period has been the amendment of the Turkish Commercial Code (TCC). We should be thankful for this. With this amendment the path for change in the corporate sector has been paved. Turkey still needs some time to design star sectors, but the way to identify star firms has been paved. For an evaluation of the meaning of the amendment of the TCC, please read on.

Give the devil his due, I want to congratulate everyone in the ruling party and the opposition parties for passing through Parliament a proposal composed of 1535 articles. Almost a year ago, President of the Union of the Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey, Rifat Hisarcıklıoğlu, together with the representatives of civil society institutions connected with the business world and visited all of the party leaders to talk about amending the said code. I was there, too. Despite all the hustle and bustle, it quickly become evident that there existed a basis for consensus on the code. Eventually the attempts gave fruits and the codes were amended.

Now let us talk about the core issues. I believe that a series of structural reforms must be implemented to ensure that Turkey achieves a healthy growth path. We have postponed reforms so far due to concerns about their cost. But the postponed reforms now bother us and hinder growth and development. This is why the sovereign ratings have not improved and why Turkey has entered the process of deindustrialization. This is why short-term rather than long-term capital prefers Turkey. We need to take a series of steps in many fields from budget reform to education reform, and from reforms to overcome the operational problems of the judiciary to infrastructure reforms. However, it seemed impossible to bear the political and material costs of taking these big steps given the general elections in 2011 and 2015, the presidential elections in 2012, and the local elections in 2013. At least that was what I thought. This is the first point to underline in today's discussion.

In such a milieu where we fail to take big steps the restructuring of the corporate sector can be enabled through market dynamics. It is enough to remove the barriers to the restructuring of the sector. The recent amendments in the TCC are to open new horizons in the milieu where foreign investors' interest in Turkish firms will be animated. This is an opportunity for Turkey. Let this be the second point to stress.

How will the change in the corporate sector be enabled? I believe that the private equity activity devoted to investing in the stocks of resident firms to handle their business plans - the tailoring of modifications in a way - will be a significant tool of change in the period ahead. We are on the eve of a period where merger and acquisitions as well as private equity transactions might increase. The amendments in the TCC not only will ­ modernize merger and acquisition transactions, but also will take a number of critical steps in the stock markets. This is groundbreaking. This is what I was thinking when listening to Prof. Zühtü Aytaç of Bilkent University during a meeting in Kiev.

The third point goes like this: In order for the TCC to come into effect completely, some twenty secondary regulations must be introduced as soon as possible. Actually, in addition to this, the Capital Markets Board should return to the basics of the operation of the stock and bond markets and focus on its fundamental responsibility.

The Parliament has fulfilled its duty, now it is the administration process becomes the focus of interest.

Turkey's agenda is composed of unemployment and economic performance, not some trivial issues such as who booed the Prime Minister in the Galatasaray tribunes. Otherwise, the administrators should get prepared for more boos and whistles in the future.

This commentary was published in Radikal daily on 28.01.2011