Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Monday said he had exhausted all options to form a coalition government, leaving the country facing snap elections just months after the June 7 polls, AFP reports.
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In line with procedure, Davutoglu returned to Erdogan the mandate he received from the president on July 9 to begin coalition talks with opposition parties, the president’s office said in a statement, Al Jazeera reported.
Islamic State militants have called Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan a traitor for allowing the U.S.to use air bases for strikes against the group, and urged Muslims in Turkey to support the extremist group and fight the “crusaders, atheists and tyrants”.
The AKP, which lost its overall decade-long majority in the June elections, is forced to seek a coalition partner to form a new government. Erdogan appeared to have kicked off a new campaign again last week, addressing neighborhood administrators and representatives of non-governmental organizations, and mounting an attack on the pro-Kurdish party’s leaders.
The Turkish lira has slid to a series of record lows against the dollar in the past week after coalition talks between the country’s main parties ended without an agreement.
Following the failure of the coalition negotiations, a rerun of the June 7 general election is now expected to be held in early October.
Attempts to define Demirtas’s party as controlled by the Kurdish militants are unlikely to swing the electorate substantially in Erdogan’s, analysts say.
Of course, Erdogan’s hope is that the PKK’s attacks on government positions will lead to a loss of HDP popularity, and that the party will fail to cross the 10% threshold necessary to qualify for any seats this time.
Erdoğan, who won Turkey’s first popular presidential election in August 2014 and has since stretched the powers of a largely ceremonial post to their limits, has said the system of power has changed in Turkey.
The pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) said it would offer representatives to take part, but the nationalist MHP has made clear it would not countenance doing so.
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Even the path to an election isn’t clear, as the MHP is threatening to oppose efforts to form an interim “election government” to prepare for another vote. “I am conducting this process according to the constitution and I will continue to do so”, said Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
