Turkey will hold new parliamentary elections on November 1.
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The power-sharing interim administration looks set to be dominated by loyalists to President Erdogan and the Islamist-rooted AK Party.
At the same time, Turkey has launched its own airstrikes against Islamic State targets and has bombed Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) camps in northern Iraq.
The clashes add to investor concerns that political uncertainty is hitting the economy and helped pushed the lira to a record low against the dollar on August 20, after Davutoglu said Monday that he had exhausted all possibilities for a coalition.
Erdogan said the government was in real crisis facing a serious terrorism problem in addition to the developments on the border with Syria. “Despite the urgency of the current environment, particularly given the inevitability of further terrorist attacks, elections are unlikely to yield either a viable coalition arrangement or an outright AKP majority”. He had hoped that the party, which he founded in 2001, would win a supermajority so it could reshape Turkey’s democracy into a presidential system in which he would wield control over government affairs.
“As we failed to form a government, let’s go to elections with the votes of lawmakers, not with the president’s decision”, said Davutoglu.
He emphasized that the country needed a powerful and long-term coalition to tackle significant economic and terrorism challenges, yet the historic opportunity was missed with the collapse of talks.
He is believed to have favoured a new election, and Turkey’s main opposition leader has accused the president of obstructing the coalition-building efforts, a charge Erdogan denies.
Should opposition parties decline to nominate members for cabinet positions, their places can be taken by candidates from outside parliament.
Six months after the last election, Turks will return to the polls to vote again.
Still, Mr. Erdogan said he would not delay the inevitable.
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Erdogan wants to create the impression that Turkey can not survive without him, Kilicdaroglu said on Friday, noting that the president seeks to satisfy his ego by means of fresh polls. That would allow Turkey to hold polls just before Mr. Erdogan hosts world leaders at a G-20 summit mid-November.
