Turkey’s June 12 general election saw the pro-Kurdish movement score its biggest-ever parliamentary victory, with an increase from 20 to 36 seats in the country’s 550-member parliament. Ironically, though, the triumph comes as hopes for a peaceful solution to meeting Kurdish demands are fading.
Finishing a distant second in a Turkish parliamentary election is no easy task for a party created by the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. With 25.9 percent of the vote in Turkey’s June 12 elections, however, the People’s Republican Party (CHP) is learning to lick its wounds and carry on with an attempt to reinvent itself.
Turkey’s governing party swept to an historic landslide election win on June 12, but failed to gain enough parliamentary seats to rewrite the constitution without help from its opponents.
Turks go to the polls on June 12 for a parliamentary election all but certain to deliver victory for the ruling Justice and Development Party. Yet amidst divisive nationalist rhetoric and threats from Kurdish militants, fears of increasing authoritarianism and warnings of an overheating economy, much else regarding Turkey’s future is shrouded in doubt.
In the run-up to Turkey’s June 12 parliamentary elections, Turkish newspapers have been full of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s “crazy” plans for massive infrastructure projects. Concrete will change everything. Or so the message goes.
As Turkey’s June 12 parliamentary elections draw nearer, public attention is focusing on how a set of explicit videos involving politicians from Turkey’s third largest political party, the ultranationalist MHP, are influencing voting preferences.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan appears to see the construction of a canal near Istanbul that would link the Black and Marmara seas as a lynchpin of his political legacy. But political experts and economists are viewing the project with caution, worrying that it could have a destabilizing impact on existing energy and security arrangements.
With just weeks to go before Turkey’s June 12 parliamentary vote, discontent among the country’s ethnic Kurdish minority is fostering political uncertainty for the governing Justice and Development Party.
In a room adorned only with a portrait of Kemal Atatürk, Celal Yilmaz, head of the Alevi village of Kayaburun in eastern Turkey, listens carefully to a surprise request -- a town-hall meeting with a female parliamentary candidate from the ruling Justice and Development Party.
