A Turkish parliamentary committee on Wednesday set July 22 as the date for snap general elections after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for polls to end a simmering crisis over a disputed presidential vote.
The date has to be voted into law by parliament to become official, which should be a formality since all parties represented in the house favor the early elections.
The move to hold early general elections eases a conflict between the Islam-based government and secular forces in the short term, but the crisis over how to deal with political Islam in this Western-looking democracy appears far from resolved.
Turkish society is deeply divided, and secular Turks have resorted to controversial means -- a parliamentary boycott, mass protests and a threat of military intervention -- in an attempt to erode the power of Erdogan, who they fear is trying to drag Turkey toward Islamic rule.
Until recently, Erdogan looked certain to use his majority in parliament to consolidate his control over the entire executive by installing a close ally, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, in the presidency. But the backlash against the move seems to have caught him by surprise and could lead instead to a dramatic reshuffling of Turkey's government.
It has also intensified a debate on reforming the way Turkey's representative system works.
In response to Erdogan's choice for president, hundreds of thousands of secular Turks protested against the ruling party in Istanbul and Ankara, and the opposition boycotted a parliamentary session and filed a successful appeal to the Constitutional Court to have the first round of voting for president annulled. The pro-secular military threatened to intervene to curb the rise of political Islam.
On Wednesday, Erdogan called the Constitutional Court decision a "bullet fired at democracy," but said he would abide by it. He had little choice.
Looming in the background of Turkey's democratic process is the military. The institution has carried out three coups since 1960 and nudged a pro-Islamic premier out of power in 1997, but is widely respected and traditionally has the final word on how to enforce the separation of religion and state.
"It must not be forgotten that the Turkish armed forces are a party to this debate and are the absolute defenders of secularism," the military said in a statement released just before midnight on Friday. "When necessary, they will demonstrate their attitudes and behaviors in a clear and open way. Let no one doubt this."
The threat of overthrowing an elected government prompted condemnation from leaders in the EU, which Turkey wants to join. But many Turks say the role of Turkey's military is poorly understood abroad and that by undermining it, Westerners actually undermine Turkish democracy.
Erdogan's party has raised secularist hackles primarily because it has its roots in Turkey's Islamist political movement, and Erdogan even spent time in jail in 1999 for challenging the secular system. But it rose to power in 2002 on an anti-corruption platform, riding a wave of dissatisfaction with the previous government.
Zeyno Baran, an analyst for the Hudson Institute, said in a presentation to the US Senate that the current crisis illustrated a dangerous tendency by Turks to vote irresponsibly because they relied excessively on the military to "save them" if anything went wrong, and also pointed to fundamental flaws in the Turkish representational system.
A political party must receive at least 10 percent of the vote to enter parliament in Turkey. But when only two parties did so in the elections of 2002, the remaining seats were distributed proportionally among them, giving Erdogan's party 66 percent of the seats.
China is racing to quash a new COVID-19 flareup that risks spilling over into one of its most economically significant regions, raising the specter of disruptions that could roil global supply chains for solar panels, medicines and semiconductors. Infections have surged in Si County in the eastern province of Anhui, with officials reporting 287 cases for Sunday and nearly 1,000 since late last week. Authorities locked down Si and a neighboring county late last week to try and stop the virus from spreading to Jiangsu Province, the second-biggest contributor to China’s economic output and a globally important manufacturing hub for the
A flight test of a hypersonic missile system in Hawaii on Wednesday ended in failure due to a problem that occurred after ignition, the US Department of Defense said, delivering a fresh blow to a program that has experienced stumbles. It did not provide details of what took place in the test, but said in an e-mailed statement that “the department remains confident that it is on track to field offensive and defensive hypersonic capabilities on target dates beginning in the early 2020s.” “An anomaly occurred following ignition of the test asset,” Pentagon spokesman US Navy Lieutenant Commander Tim Gorman said in
OPPOSITION PROTESTS: Many people in Myanmar suspect China of supporting the military takeover, while Beijing has refused to condemn last year’s army power grab China’s top diplomat on Saturday arrived on his first visit to Myanmar since the military seized power last year to attend a regional meeting that the Burmese government said was a recognition of its legitimacy and opponents protested as a violation of peace efforts. Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) is to join counterparts from Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam in a meeting of the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation group in the central city of Bagan, a UNESCO World Heritage site. The grouping is a Chinese-led initiative that includes the countries of the Mekong Delta, a potential source of regional tensions
CERN UPGRADES: ompared with the collider’s first run that discovered the Higgs boson in 2012, this time around there would be 20 times more collisions Ten years after it discovered the Higgs boson, the Large Hadron Collider is about to start smashing protons together at unprecedented energy levels in its quest to reveal more secrets about how the universe works. The world’s largest and most powerful particle collider started back up in April after a three-year break for upgrades in preparation for its third run. From today it will run around the clock for nearly four years at a record energy of 13.6 trillion electronvolts, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced at a news conference last week. It is to send two beams of protons
RSS