Beware: All Eyes on ISIS While Ergodan Seeks De Facto Sultanate
Explosions rip through a group of protesters staging an anti-government peace rally in Ankara, October 2015, resulting in the worst ever single terror attack in Turkey’s modern history. The upsurge in violence helped propel President Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) to a stronger showing in the November elections, but he did not receive enough votes to change the constitution.
Secular and liberal Turks sighed with premature relief when on June 7, 2015, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) lost its parliamentary majority in general elections for the first time since it came to power in November 2002. With 41 percent of the national vote (compared with 49.8 percent in the 2011 general elections), the AKP won eighteen fewer seats than necessary to form a single-party government in Turkey’s 550-member parliament. More importantly, its parliamentary seats fell widely short of the minimum number needed to rewrite the constitution in the way Erdogan wanted it so as to introduce an executive presidential system that would give him uncontrolled powers with few checks and balances, if any.
Undaunted by what looked like an election defeat, Erdogan chose to toss the dice again. At his instructions, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu pretended to hold coalition negotiations with opposition parties while secretly laying the groundwork for snap elections. In Erdogan’s thinking, the loss of a few more seats would make no difference to AKP power, but re-winning a parliamentary majority would make the situation totally different. Then a terrible wave of violence gripped Turkey.
First, the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan, PKK), which had been fighting a guerrilla war from mountain hideouts in northern Iraq, declared an end to its unilateral ceasefire begun in 2013. Then on July 20, a Turkish suicide bomber killed more than thirty people at a pro-Kurdish gathering in the small town of Suruc. Claiming that the Turkish state had a secret role in the bombing, the PKK killed two policemen in the town of Ceylanpinar. The three-decades-old violence between the Turkish and Kurdish communities had suddenly roared back with a vengeance. In one of Turkey’s bloodiest summers ever, more than a thousand PKK fighters and Turkish security officials were killed. (Read more from “Beware: All Eyes on ISIS While Ergodan Seeks De Facto Sultanate” HERE)
Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.
