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The Grand Turk
Pro-Kurdish party holds key to Turkey's 'knife-edge' elections
2015-05-23
[RUDAW.NET] The Sick Man of Europe Turkey
...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire....
's June 7 elections are turning into a showdown between the pro-Kurdish HDP party and the ruling AKP party's biggest champion, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan
... Turkey's version of Mohammed Morsi but they voted him back in so they deserve him...
The outcome of the polls -- seen as Turkey's most crucial -- will decide not only the fate of NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A single organization with differing goals, equipment, language, doctrine, and organization....
member Turkey, but the region as a whole.

The elections are crucial because the Justice and Development Party (AKP) stands firmly behind Erdogan's ambitions to change the constitution and take Turkey from a parliamentary system to a presidential one. He also wants nearly total power invested in the presidency.

The Peoples´ Democratic Party (HDP), on the other hand, is fighting to win at least 10 percent of the votes in order to qualify for a seat in parliament as a party.

If it wins, it will be the first time that a Kurdish party sits in the Turkish parliament. In addition, HDP co-leader Selahattin Demirtas has vowed to derail the president's plans to change the constitution and to bar him from consolidating greater power.

¨Mr Recep Tayyip Erdogan, you will never be able to be the head of the nation as long as the HDP exists and as long as the HDP people are on this soil," Demirtas said at a party meeting last month.

For the first time in Turkish history, a pro-Kurdish party holds the key to what is seen as Turkey´s most critical elections ever.

Ironically -- and reluctantly -- the HDP has turned into the hope both of anti-AKP republicans and leftists. But that does not necessarily mean they will vote for the Kurdish party.

That is because they are highly suspicious that HDP would strike a deal with Erdogan in return for sealing a peace deal with the Kurdistan Workers´ Party (PKK), whose incarcerated
Please don't kill me!
leader Abdullah Ocalan still calls the shots over Kurdish politics in Turkey. Ankara refers to the PKK as a "terrorist" organization.

It is with this backdrop that a sharp confrontation has begun and is escalating by the day, as HDP rises in polls.

After simultaneous kabooms hit the offices of the HDP in two cities in southern Turkey on Monday, Demirtas openly blamed Erdogan.
Posted by:Fred