The importance of this week does not only lie in Turkey’s upcoming presidential and parliamentary elections.
Turkey will go to the polls to elect the president and the parliament next Sunday on June 24. A rather short pre-election campaign held by the candidates to the president and the parliament has re-surfaced Turkey’s fundamental and growingly acute problems.
Turkey’s changing security doctrine stipulates more of an offensive approach than defensive, with intensified anti-terror campaigns in neighboring Iraq and Syria, where the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and its Syrian offshoot, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), have long been sheltering and posing threats from.
With nearly two weeks left until the June 24 elections, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced that his government would terminate the state of emergency that has been in place since July 2016, in the event that he is re-elected as head of the nation.
Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu paid a short but very important visit to the United States for talks with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on June 4. Due to his election campaigning, following his talks in Washington D.C., he had to immediately return to his homeland and constituency, Antalya. As a group of Ankara bureau chiefs of the media outlets, we had the opportunity to hold a press conference with him on June 5, only hours after his landing.
There are slightly more than three weeks to go until one of Turkey’s most important elections. Around 60 million people in the Turkish electorate will vote for the country’s executive-president and for the 600-seat parliament in the June 24 elections. With intensified pre-election rallies and political activities in the last few weeks, there are important snapshots about the polls and its results.
Hatice Genç was 19 years old, Hülya Genç was 9, Saime Genç was 5, Gülsün İnce was 28 and Gülistan Öztürk was 12 when they were slaughtered in an arson attack carried out by a neo-Nazi group in the German city of Solingen on May 29, 1993.
Amid sound and fury over looming key presidential and parliamentary elections, there are some very important developments in the field of foreign policy that carry the risk of further deteriorating ties between Turkey and the United States.
With just a month to go until the snap elections, all political parties are set to finalize their election manifestos, outlining the fundamental political lines they will pursue in the fields of the economy, social issues and foreign policy if elected on June 24.
