Elected president in 2014, Erdogan overstepped the powers of a constitutionally non-partisan office by campaigning to get the Islamist party he founded, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), a sufficient parliamentary majority to change Turkey from a parliamentary to a presidential system.
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Turkey does not want the establishment of a de facto Kurdish polity in northern Syria along its border, given the new haven this would provide for the separatist PKK. Erdogan accuses Gulen’s followers in the judiciary of cooking up a corruption probe against the president’s family and other prominent businessmen and politicians as a way to gain power.
Davutoglu, who has said he is confident the AKP will be able to regain its single-party rule, said in an interview on Sunday that his party would not leave the country without a government “even for a day” after the vote.
“Whether it suits us or not, whether we like it or not, we have to work together with Turkey”, Juncker said after lawmakers raised issues about the European Union candidate country’s rights record. At issue is whether the party that represents their interests can “transform itself into a modern leftist party” with broad appeal, or whether it remains under the shadow of the PKK, the militant group whose insurgency against the Turkish state has claimed a few 40,000 lives since the 1980s.
“Even AKP would win enough votes to establish a single-party government, I still insist that a coalition would be the better choice for solving Turkey’s problem”, Sensoy from TASAM told Xinhua.
Increasingly bellicose in the lead up to Turkish elections, President Erdogan has increasingly positioned the nation as the military guarantor of ISIS, railing simultaneously against Russian Federation and the U.S. for baking various anti-ISIS measures they see as benefiting the Kurds.
The conflict’s resumption has added to investor perceptions of risk that were already deteriorating with the political turmoil.
In this Wednesday, October 14, 2015 photo, a painting of Turkish… The AKP, the Islamic-conservative ruling party and President Erdogan, have repeatedly accused not only the PKK which has ended the lull in the fighting after the bombing of Suruc, but the HDP itself and its leader Demirtas of “terrorism”.
It would also be a personal blow to Erdogan who after 11 years as prime minister won Turkey’s first popular presidential poll last year, with the aim of using a strong AKP majority to bestow his largely ceremonial post with broad executive powers.
Unfortunately, all these are now facts of a country which was just until three years ago was celebrated as the “Model State” in the turbulent Middle East. Neither the country has seen a natural disaster on a catastrophic scale nor has it been invaded by a savage medieval army to alter its fortune to this extent in such a short period.
The AKP of president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan failed to win an outright majority for the first time since taking power in 2002. The party agrees that the existing charter, imposed in 1982 after a military coup, needs to expand rights and freedoms. The AKP does not anymore enjoy the support of 50 per cent Turkish voters, which Erdogan boastfully referred to during the Gezi Park protests.
The uptick in violence could also erode the HDP’s support among non-Kurdish voters, according to Mehmet Kaya, head of the Tigris Communal Research Center in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir.
In the violence, one of Erdogan’s most notable accomplishments peace talks with the PKK to end decades of violence and integrate the Kurdish southeast has come undone. But in a deeply polarized country, the most likely result is more confusion.
Fadi Hakura, an associate fellow at London’s Chatham House, says, “Erdogan traditionally has been a street fighter”.
Davutoğlu also argued that he has never made a statement “legitimatizing” the activities of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), in reply to the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) co-leader Selahattin Demirtaş’s earlier comments. “We say: ‘We’re here, there’s no need for guns'”.
“We’re now the reality of this county”. We hit both DAESH and the PKK.
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“We’re not entirely sure that’s accurate so we’re watching it very closely because of the implications in Ankara and the potential tension that we have with the Turks over this real opportunity to take advantage of the capacity of opposition elements in Syria that can, in fact, liberate large segments of the population and the region from ISIL”, said Allen. “You can no longer do politics around here without us”.
