ANKARA – The third term of the Turkish prime minister got off to a turbulent start yesterday when the main opposition party and minority Kurds boycotted parliament’s swearing-in to protest against bans on elected candidates.
The boycott meant more than 30 per cent of elected MPs refused to take their oath as parliament convened for the first time since the June 12th election.
Tayyip Erdogan’s AK Party, which has turned Turkey into one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, had promised after its comfortable election win to seek consensus on a new constitution.
But the boycotts by the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) could force mass byelections and stoke separatist violence in the restless, mainly Kurdish, southeast. The CHP won 135 seats in the 550-seat parliament. The BDP won 36.
“We will not take the oath unless the way is open for all our deputies to take the oath,” CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu said, after a court rejected an appeal for the release of two CHP candidates under detention without having been convicted. Eight elected candidates – five from the BDP, two from the CHP and one nationalist – have been barred from taking their seats by courts for being in jail. Their seats will remain vacant.
A ninth candidate from the BDP, the party supported by the bulk of Turkey’s 15 million Kurds, had his seat stripped by the election board because of a conviction for spreading “terrorist propaganda”.
The seat was awarded to a runner-up from AK.
– (Reuters)