COLUMNISTS
November 03, 2015, Tuesday
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If balcony promises are really kept
The Justice and Development Party (AK Party) failed to come to power as a single-party government in the election held five months ago. Now, it came to an overwhelming victory with an almost 10-percent increase. Everyone is now curious: What has changed in the last five months to drive the tremendous increase in the AK Party's votes? There are various reasons. In the wake of the June 7 election, voters wanted political parties to establish a coalition -
Pyrrhic victory in Turkey snap poll
After having lost the majority in the legislative branch and by extension the power to dominate the executive arm of the state alone in the June 7 election, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the de facto leader of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP), dissolved Parliament and called for a snap election on Nov. 1 in order to slow the momentum of the growing opposition to his authoritarian rule. Frankly, he did not have any other choice. On the surface it ap -
Politics of fear pays back, cost of stability uncertain
Resurfacing after the defeat in the June 7 election, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan managed to derail all the attempts by the opposition to share power, shake off the burden of all the corruption allegations about his rule and, as if that were not enough, run over dissent with full force, gambling big on the tactics based on fear and politics of crisis, and win. The voters, the middle class, rural and urban, agreed with such a cunning engineering and bought into his -
Turkey’s problem, as we enter AKP’s fourth term in power
From the very start, this is what I've maintained: The Nov. 1 election was entirely the result of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan being displeased with the results from the June 7 election. The Nov. 1 election was forced on us by the palace. It was an election that completely discounted the will of the people. It was an election that aimed to blackmail voters, with dark references to negative economic developments, not to mention the “fight against terrorism.”< -
The election: an assessment
Let me tell you outright what I want to say in this column. The Turkish electorate has made a conscious choice. The choice was between a single party majority the electorate knows has a lot of deficiencies, including corruption and authoritarian tendencies, and the prospect of lengthy inconclusive coalition talks with the potential of a worsening economy and probably more violence. They chose the first alternative. It was a rational choice and it demonstra -
2011 and 2015: Same results, different reasons
The results from the 2011 election and the Nov. 1 election were nearly identical. One could view the percentage picked up this time around by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) as reflecting the limits of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's populism. Although this time the mentality driving the populism, as well as the reasons for the results and the particular dynamism seen, are very different from what we saw in 2011. Inherent in the differences between the -
The winners and losers of Nov. 1
This Sunday, the ballot boxes produced an unexpected result. The Justice and Development Party (AKP) obtained 49.5 percent of the vote, well over the level of support forecasted by electoral surveys -- the final ones showed results of between 41.7 percent to 47.2 percent. The first losers are certainly these surveys and the uncontestable winner is the AKP and its de facto leader President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The AKP won 316 seats, while it could only get 258 seats -
Turkish voters’ red card to opposition
The Justice and Development Party (AK Party) is, in its 13th year, once again in power as a single party. Voters' preferences should be respected. I congratulate the AK Party for its success. The Nov. 1 election gave rise to an opposition problem instead of a government problem. Voters showed a red card to the opposition. Having urged them to establish a coalition government through conciliation in the wake of the June 7 election, voters penalized the opposition -
A difficult transition
Stunned by the extent of the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) victory, opposition parties will no doubt engage in soul searching in the coming weeks. Pollsters, commentators and other observers of Turkish politics will have to do the same because no one accurately read the signals from the electorate. Stability, or the promise of it, turned out to be the dominant concern. The AK Party that has just been elected to a fourth term is very different from th -
Foreign neighborhood, or the only foreigner in the neighborhood
Last week I had a stimulating conversation with two fellow expats. Besides many other topics, we spoke about which parts of town are currently “in” with international residents. We agreed that there are the usual suspects, i.e., areas automatically recommended by estate agents should a foreign customer step into their office. Yet at the same time the three of us thought that branching out into the unknown makes equally good flat-hunting sense, since aft -
’Get out, impertinent man’
The claim about Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen is that he has established and administers a terrorist organization called the Fethullah Terror Organization (FETÖ). In order to believe this claim, we need to see a terrorist act, a trial, or at least an indictment, but there have not been any. Yet only the claim has given the government the right to seize control of Koza İpek Holding and its media enterprises for "aiding" this organization. The ma
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