adminANKARA. – The Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has announced snap elections on June 24, more than a year earlier than planned. Erdogan said the country urgently needed to make the switch to an executive presidency. He said he made the decision after speaking to the head of the nationalist MHP party, Devlet Bahçeli, who a day earlier had floated the prospect of early polls.
The parliamentary and presidential polls had previously been slated for November 2019. Erdogan has established a formal alliance with the MHP to fight the elections, which made it hard for his Justice and Development party (AKP) to to dismiss Bahçeli’s call out of hand.
Bahçeli had argued there was “no point in prolonging this any longer,” citing efforts by unnamed circles to foment chaos in Turkey.
MHP leader since 1997, Bahçeli is seen as a kingmaker in Turkish politics and has played a role in some key moments of its modern history. He precipitated the 2002 snap polls that brought the AKP to power. The AKP has ruled Turkey ever since.
A failed coup attempt in Turkey in July 2016 was followed by wide-ranging crackdown that has led to tens of thousands of people being imprisoned or dismissed from their jobs in the judiciary, civil service, military, police, media and academia – a purge that has gone beyond the alleged coup plotters to encompass dissidents of all stripes.
The plot was blamed by the Turkish government on a movement led by Fethullah Gülen, an exiled preacher now based in the US with thousands of grassroots followers. – The Guardian
Online Reporter