Parliament has less initiative than a tax office: HDP

ANKARA

HÜRRİYET photo

Despite the amount of pressing issues on the country’s agenda, the parliament is not able to focus on these items as there is a de facto ban on addressing the real issues by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a co-chair of the Kurdish problem-focused Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) has said.

Speaking at a parliamentary group meeting of his party on Jan. 12, HDP co-chair Selahattin Demirtaş started by extending condolences to families of the victims who lost their lives in an Jan. 12 Istanbul suicide attack he called a “brutal massacre.”

“We are condemning the massacre in Sultanahmet. God willing, this attack doesn’t turn into a massacre that is hidden behind closed doors like the others. I want to state that as the HDP, we condemn these kinds of attacks until the end and we will not stop following it in order to not leave it in the dark and to reveal the ones responsible,” he said.

Turkey’s population receives notices of deaths every day and every hour, becoming a sort of “routine agenda” for the country, he said.

The parliament acts as though its agenda is that of Norway’s parliament, the HDP co-chair said, underlining the parliament’s lack of drive to solve the country’s current problems.

 “The parliament doesn’t have an initiative that a tax office has. It is helpless and desperate. Why? Because the group forming the majority is not bound by the people, but are bound by the palace,” he said, in an apparent reference to President Erdoğan. 

After reading out the weekly agenda of the parliament’s general assembly, Demirtaş said: “You would assume that it is the agenda of a parliament of a country that is very far away. Parliament and deputies have been rendered functionless. The parliament is now busy with trivial matters. The opposition, [and] only a part of it, is busy with the society’s problems. The rest of the deputies are not able to go beyond the orders of the palace although they, humanely, have difficulty in doing so.” 

Demirtaş suggested that what is going on today is a result of a policy purposefully aimed to force others to conclude that “the parliament is not manageable without a presidential system.”