Turkey's governing party moved this week to further reduce the power of the country's staunchly secular old guard, submitting a series of amendments to Turkey's military-coup-era 1982 Constitution, but passage is far from assured. A number of the 26 amendments, if passed, would strike at a center of power for the old elite, the judiciary, by opening up its appointment process and expanding its membership. For generations, Turkey's judiciary has been controlled by a small class of hard-line secularists with a rigidly nationalist ideology, and the European Union, which Turkey hopes to join, has long urged that it be changed. The amendments require 367 votes out of 550 to become law, more than the governing party has. At the same time, the secular opposition party is having trouble gathering the 110 votes needed to kill the package in the constitutional court. Some liberals criticize the measures for falling short of what is needed for deeper democracy in Turkey, while opponents of the ruling party, Justice and Development, say the amendments are an effort by its leader, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to consolidate his power. But supporters say the changes would start to bring Turkey in line with European countries. 'When you actually look at what the amendments propose, you see that all changes are copied from examples that function quite well in EU member states,' said Joost Lagendijk, senior adviser at the Istanbul Policy Center at Sabanci University and a former European Parliament member. The current constitution, which enshrines Turkey's secular mandate, has been amended several times since it was put in place, and most Turkish intellectuals argue that it should be scrapped entirely. Some government officials argue that the changes are necessary to break away from a troubled past of military coups and strong control of the state by a small coterie of unelected officials in the bureaucracy and the judiciary. Critics of the newly proposed amendments fear that the key changes -- the way appointments are made to the constitutional court, the main watchdog of secularism in Turkey, and to the Senior Council of Judges and Prosecutors, responsible for judicial appointments and monitoring court officials -- would damage Turkey's founding principles. They do not trust Erdogan, whose party arose from a class of Muslim entrepreneurs upon whom upper-class secular Turks long looked down. 