Despite a very broad societal consensus in Turkey on the need for a new constitution, the parliamentary process supported by an energetic political-public sphere failed. This failure in drafting a new and democratic constitution, on the other hand, has not been a surprise, because even if all major political actors in the process seem to have agreed on the need to achieve a new constitution, the languages preferred therein have been quite diverse and contradictory. This diversity and contradiction, I argue, can be understood best by a reference to three different theoretical approaches to the concept of the political with corresponding notions of the constitution. First is Carl Schmitt’s perspective that subjects the validity of the constitution (and the legal order in general) to a prior political decision on the identity of the community and its friends and foes (“politics as us vs. them”). David Easton’s understanding of politics as “authoritative allocation of values”, on the other hand, corresponds to a constitutional model based on “the market model of democracy” with a notion of “politics as business”. Jürgen Habermas’s perspective on law and democracy, as the third alternative, puts the emphasis on the need for a procedural legitimation of collectively binding rules and thus provides for a critical understanding of the relationship between politics and the constitution. It has to be added that the Habermasian perspective differs crucially from the Schmittian and Eastonian approaches in its normative stance on the need for transcending the nation-state framework of constitutional politics. As for the Turkish context, this paper wants to show that the failure of the new constitution-making process can be explained as a consequence of a deadlock between “Turkish Schmittians” (i.e. political actors subjecting the constitution and the law to antagonistic self-imaginations of the political community, that is “the nation”). By way of conclusion, the paper would argue that, Turkey, both as a member of Council of Europe and a candidate for EU membership, must adopt a Habermasian approach to politics and the constitution.