Page 16 - TURKRptMay19

Party (AKP) lost its parliamentary majority in a general election. On election night, Devlet Bahceli, leader of the ultra-nationalist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), ruled out forming any coalition government requiring backing from the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) and called for another election.
Erdogan was not seen in the media for a while.
In July, 2015, the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) was back in the spotlight just at the very time that Erdogan needed it for his own ends. Islamic State—if we can put this in the most politically correct way—had no problem with the AKP government by that time, and was in the news bombing campaigners for peace in Syria outside a culture centre in Suruc in Turkey’s southern Sanliurfa province.
While then PM and AKP head Ahmet Davutoglu was stalling the main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), with coalition talks, bedlam broke out in Turkey with consecutive terrorist attacks ascribed to the PKK and Islamic State hitting big population centres.
When the legally prescribed period for coalition talks drew to a close, Erdogan, as president, exercised his legislative authority to call a snap poll.
On November 1, 2015, the Islamist-rooted AKP regained its parliamentary majority in the subsequent election.
Turkish feelings were ablaze as the national battle was joined in the fight against the terrorists said to be behind the outrages in major cities and urban campaigns were fought against the PKK in southeastern provinces.
Coup predicted. On April 21, 2016, pro-Erdogan columnist Fuat Ugur wrote in the Turkiye daily that armed Gulenist members of the so-called Fethullahist Terrorist Organization (also known as FETO, officials have named it after Erdogan’s former ally and now enemy Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic preacher exiled in the US, who denies any connection to terrorism) were getting ready to stage a coup and that the government was preparing to identify them when they attempted it.
Other journalists loyal to Erdogan were voicing opinions that most of the country’s F-16 fighter pilots were members of FETO, even while public opinion did not take them seriously.
In a snapshot for the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED), academic Howard Eissenstat of St Lawrence University in New York State, in December 2017 wrote: “During the first decade of AKP rule, Erdogan accepted and indeed encouraged the Gulenists’ expansion inside Turkey’s security institutions. The alliance between Erdogan and the Gulen movement facilitated the entrenchment of Gulen-affiliated police, prosecutors, and judges who soon proved effective in going after shared political enemies.
“They targeted pro-Kurdish activists and politicians in mass trials between 2009 and 2011. More famously, they launched the Ergenekon trials that began in 2008 and the Sledgehammer trial that began the following year, both of which prosecuted secularists for alleged attempts to overthrow the democratic order. The deeply flawed trials sent thousands to prison, including leading members of the military, based on incomplete or non-existent evidence. The effect was to sideline many traditional Kemalists in the officer corps and to increase the influence of Erdogan’s political allies, including Gulen. The trials inaugurated a strategy that would dramatically expand the politicization of key state institutions and set the basic formulae for today’s purges.”
Ignorant romantic. In May 2016, Erdogan ordered PM Davutoglu to resign. Davutoglu is an ignorant romantic famous for his baseless neo-Ottomanist
16 TURKEY Country Report May 2019 www.intellinews.com