Last month, police detained four Kayseri businessmen, including the boss of Boydak Holding which employs 14,000 people, as part of a probe into a “parallel structure” that Erdogan says operates in the judiciary and police. The attack on an IS cell was reportedly a reaction to the Ankara bombing on October 10. In the eyes of Erdogan and his faith-based, conservative AK Party, the culprits are terrorists of the PKK, Islamist extremists of the IS kind, or the clandestine leftist organisation DHKP-C – plus, of course, the pro-Kurdish Party of the Peoples (HDP), which has close links to the PKK, but opposes violent means.
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In his speech, the president said that the presidential complex was a symbol where the state meets its citizens. In recent weeks, dozens of public meeting places of this party were attacked and sometimes even torched by thugs linked to the AKP without the police stopping them; on the contrary a criminal investigation has opened against Demirtas for “insulting the Turkish people, institutions and organs of the State, the President”, “incitement to commit crimes and terrorism” after in a press conference he had denounced the culpable passivity of the police!
Earlier on October 27, upon an announcement by Davutoğlu that Turkey had struck Kurdish militia fighters in Syria twice after they defied Ankara’s warning not to cross west of the Euphrates River, Demirtaş said the government “apparently” wasn’t satisfied with ongoing conflict in the country and seemed eager to declare war against the Syrian Kurdish region.
Erdogan has accused the HDP of being merely the political wing of the outlawed PKK – listed as a “terrorist organization” by Turkey, the European Union and United States – a charge that the party denies.
That makes a few Kurdish activists feel vulnerable.
At a party conference after the June elections, Erdogan managed to install his own loyalists among the party hierarchy and on the list of candidates for Sunday’s poll.
Neighbored by warring countries and flooded with refugees, Turkey will hold general elections Sunday, November 1, for the second time in five months. This government has not only deprived the country of any goodwill it had enjoyed in the worldwide arena but has in fact taken it to new lows in the region.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for new elections after Davutoglu failed to form a coalition with any of the three opposition parties represented in parliament. The main opposition party, CHP, is predicted to win additional seats compared to the June election.
The businessmen are thought to be supporters of Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic preacher and ally-turned-foe of Erdogan. “It should be in power by itself, alone”, said Omer Guler, an AKP supporter standing outside a campaign office in Istanbul. “If they come together for a coalition, it will not work”, he said. The economy is in shambles, both internal and external security is extremely fragile, inflation is at highest levels, businessmen and women have lost entrepreneurial freedom, schools, coaching centres, universities and all other educational institutions have been politically subjugated, information sharing has been severely restricted, religion has been shamelessly abused and politicised and, above all, social polarisation has reached a risky level – possibly even risking a civil war.
“This is somebody who is certainly the most talented politician of his generation”, said Gareth Jenkins, a longtime Turkey watcher.
– 73 percent of its population lives in urban areas.
Voters are adapting as well to the idea of a coalition government in Turkey, polls show. We know what is happening on the ground.
The working day is very long: the legal working time is 45 hours per week, but in 2011 more than 6 million people (more than 40% of the workforce) worked from 50 to 70 hours or more.
Altinay said Turkey was beginning to resemble its neighbors, adding: “Once you let that genie out of the bottle it’s hard to get it back in”. Despite this, there is little optimism among Kurds ahead of Sunday’s vote.
Polls suggest that the outcome of the upcoming elections will differ only slightly from the previous one.
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This week, U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby had a warning for Turkey’s leaders following a spate of police attacks on members of the media, including Wednesday’s police raid on a media company in Istanbul that authorities say has ties to a movement that it considers a terrorist organization.
