İYİ Party suggests early polls can be held in June 2022

ANKARA

Meral Akşener, the chairwoman of the İYİ (Good) Party has argued that the government may prefer to go to the polls in June 2022 instead of June 2023, given the recent indications.

“Recent moves concerning the interest rates, [the decrease of the values of] the dollar and the euro… [A measure] which has indexed the [Turkish Lira] deposits to the foreign currencies. What do they all mean?” Akşener said at a meeting with business circles in İzmir on Dec. 27.

“If the elections will take place before 2023, they can either be held in late May or June [2022]. This may be my forecast given the economic picture,” she stressed.

Turkey would normally go to the presidential and parliamentary polls in June 2023, but the opposition presses on the government to hold them as soon as possible due to the mounting economic, social and political problems in Turkey.

Although she said the polls can take place in 2022, Akşener reiterated that it has become much difficult to predict what the government will do as she has no idea of what is being done.

“In the past, I could understand [President Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan much better. We had predicted that June 24 [2018] elections would happen right after the July 15 [coup attempt in 2016],” she recalled.

Akşener, whose party is a formal member of the four-party Nation Alliance with the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the Democrat Party and the Felicity Party, stressed that the opposition alliance might expand with the participation of two more political parties.

“Perhaps, we will be a six-party Nation Alliance in the next elections,” she said, referring to the Future Party and the Democracy and Progress Party (DEVA). These two parties joined the Nation Alliance’s efforts to draft the principles of a return to the parliamentary system should the opposition’s candidate win the presidential elections and get a substantial parliamentary majority.