Taken slightly aback by the question, Mr Erdogan said: “You probably could not have asked that question if this country was a dictatorship”.
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Michael Wuthrich, assistant director for the Center for Global and worldwide Studies, is an expert on the history of Turkish elections and author of “National Elections in Turkey: People, Politics, and the Party System”, which was published by Syracuse University Press this summer. If this narrative were to take hold, the AKP has the hope of winning the parliamentary elections.
“It is like something out of Antigone [who was forbidden to bury the body of her brother killed in battle]”, says Mr Guler.
Whatever government is formed would rule a deeply divided Turkey, facing a revived war with the PKK and fallout from the bloody Syrian conflict.
According to Debka’s well-informed sources, the Saudi ambassador to Ankara, Mr. Adel Serajedin Merdad has allegedly met with Turkish Premier Davutoğlu where the latter promised the Turkish official that Saudi Arabia will pay Erdoğan’s election campaign with $17 billion in grants and support his bid to crush Turkish judiciary.
Turkey heads to the polls on Sunday for a snap vote after elections in June proved inconclusive.
Relations between the government and the Kurds deteriorated rapidly as Mr Erdogan and AKP leaders repeatedly accused the HDP, which favours a ceasefire, of being a cat’s paw of the PKK.
This sort of confusion and resultant security operations against the Kurds must be music to IS ears, as much of the Turkish government’s energies are directed against a perceived Kurdish threat.
But the jubilation turned to grief this month when two suicide bombers blew themselves up at a peace rally in Ankara, killing 102 people, many of them HDP members, in an attack blamed on the Islamic State group. And coalition talks with opposition parties didn’t work out. Murat Yetkin, a leading journalist on the liberal and secular daily Hurriyet, recalls how mobs twice attacked the office of his newspaper in September, smashing all the windows. The popular columnist, who has 3.6 million followers on Twitter, had to undergo surgery for his broken nose and ribs.
This week workers were constructing sturdier defences in the forecourt of the building, but there is a sense that all institutions critical of Mr Erdogan are under permanent siege.
Opinion polls show a result that will be close to that of June’s general election, which failed to give any party an absolute majority, thanks largely to the rise in support for the left-wing, pro-Kurd People’s Democratic Party (HDP).
There could also be splits in the AKP with a few members, including former president and Erdogan ally Abdullah Gul, reportedly thinking of forming their own party because of what they see as the president’s autocratic and aggressive tendencies.
The AKP has an overwhelming advantage when it comes to campaigning and influencing the electorate. This means that AKP will come in first, followed by the republican opposition party CHP, then the ultra nationalist MHP and finally the “new kid on the block”, the HDP, a leftist democratic party with its roots in the Kurdish political movement.
Other issues remain a slowing economy – over the past five years, economic growth has fallen from above 10% to 3% and GDP per capita has not grown since 2007 – as well as Erdogan’s increasingly authoritarian tendencies and divisiveness, which are still at the forefront of voters’ minds. “It has, for example, effectively given the green light for Assad to be part of the transition period, in line with the agreement between the USA and Russian Federation”, Batur told Al-Monitor. Its two factories closed, she lost her job and has been unable to find one since.
She says that many companies have stopped interviewing job applicants until they know the outcome of the election.
She may be disappointed whatever the election result.
Worse, Turkey’s engagement in Syria has not stopped the creation of a new Kurdish quasi-state stretching along 250 miles of Turkey’s southern frontier, which is today run by the Syrian branch of the PKK. His government seems to believe that the present mess in Syria, with IS emerging as a determining force in Syria and Iraq, is due to the US’ failure to act against the Assad regime.
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The result of the election on Sunday is unpredictable, but it has already unleashed or exacerbated powerful divisive forces.
