Erdoğan complains of anti-presidency alliance

ANKARA

DHA Photo

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has shed more light on the nefarious web of legal and illegal allies arrayed against his grand plans to impose a presidential system on Turkey while noting the axis did not represent the “nation’s will.”

“They are belittling the presidential system. Actually, by doing so, [the alliance] is displaying its own weakness and incapability but is not aware of it. When we look at who is not supporting presidential system … here is what we see: the terrorist organization [the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party/PKK] doesn’t want it, Pennsylvania [Erdoğan’s ally-turned-foe, U.S.-based Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen] doesn’t want it, those who call people ‘[idiots] scratching their bellies,’ don’t want it and the Armenian diaspora doesn’t want it,” Erdoğan said in an address to a bus company federation, while referring to a columnist who once termed people who vote for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) as ignorant people who “scratch their bellies.”

Erdoğan also said some members of the media disliked his gathering with bus drivers.

“Plus, opposition parties who don’t feel embarrassed at being on the same line with these [groups] don’t want the presidential system. Look, there is only one thing which is not present in this coalition. What is that? The nation is not there,” Erdoğan said.

His description of the anti-presidential coalition was reminiscent of Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu’s earlier description of unified opposing forces against the AKP. 

Davutoğlu said over the weekend that his party was fighting against a “six-team gang,” referring to the three opposition parties, as well as two illegal organizations and the Gülen movement.

Davutoğlu said he was fighting against the opposition parties, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), as well as the PKK, the outlawed Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C) and the movement of Gülen, whose followers are said to have formed a “parallel state” within the government and civil service in an attempt to undermine it from within.

‘We’ don’t nominate muftis in one place, gays in another place

Categorically dismissing opposition parties’ constant criticism of his active role in indirectly campaigning in favor of the AKP, of which he was the founding leader, Erdoğan blamed those opposition parties for hypocrisy, while particularly targeting the HDP.

“One of them comes up and says: ‘The president is going anywhere he is invited. Call him and he will come if you invite him when you open a jar at home,” Erdoğan said, in an apparent response to earlier sarcastic criticism posed at him by HDP co-chair Selahattin Demirtaş.

“Yes, until today, I went everywhere I was called by the nation and I will do so from now on, too,” Erdoğan added.

The president argued that opposition leaders have been presenting false images on purpose and thus have been hypocritical in their promises. While doing so, as if he were still the leader of the AKP, he compared acts and words of the opposition party leaders with his own acts and words, but not those of the prime minister and the AKP leader, Ahmet Davutoğlu.

“I’m not exploiting the emotions of my Kurdish siblings in the east and the southeast while I clink glasses with ‘White Turks’ in Istanbul,” he said. “We are not nominating a so-called mufti as a candidate in Diyarbakır and a gay as a candidate in Eskişehir,” he said, in an apparent reference to the HDP’s candidates and apparently speaking on behalf of the AKP since he used the word “we” as a subject.