Dienstag, 24.04.2018 / 23:22 Uhr

Eine Chance für die türkische Opposition?

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Aus dem Netz

Hat Erdogan sich diesmal verrechnet? Gibt es, gerade wegen den hastig vorgezogenen Neuwahlen, plötzlich eine Chance für die Opposition?

Ja, meint Amberin Zaman in einem Beitrag für Al-Monitor:

Electoral politics in Turkey — steadily fading with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s determined march toward one-man rule — has charged back with a vengeance. In the past few days, the country’s secular, main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) delighted Erodgan critics when it “loaned” 15 of its lawmakers to the fellow oppositionist Good Party in a gambit aimed at ensuring the latter’s participation in the June 24 snap election. 

“[CHP leader] Kemal Kilicdaroglu is beyond all praise,” marveled Good leader Meral Aksener in a statement. “This is a democratic approach of historic proportions.”

Even the CHP’s Islamist detractors joined in the applause. “With this move the CHP succeeded in throwing off the political inertia to which it had been condemned for so long and secured the upper hand,” wrote Mustafa Karaalioglu, a former Erdogan supporter and columnist, in the conservative daily Karar.

The CHP’s maneuver has given renewed hope to millions of Turks long resigned to an Erdogan victory as being inevitable. It also appears to have rattled Erdogan and his lieutenants. In a sign of displeasure, Erdogan and Prime Minister Binali Yildirim walked out of a parliamentary session convened on the occasion of National Children’s Day when Good Party lawmaker Nuri Okutan took the floor. Aksener riposted in a tweet, “Just wait, on June 24, the people will walk away from you.” (...)

If anything, the snap polls have galvanized the opposition into a frenzy of deal-making aimed at preventing Erdogan from winning the more than 50% of the vote needed to bag a vastly empowered presidency in the first round of balloting. A CHP operative who spoke to Al-Monitor on the condition of anonymity said that the CHP and the small pro-Islamic Felicity, which is poised to siphon votes away from Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), were working to persuade Aksener to pull out of the presidential race and to back a candidate to be jointly endorsed by all three parties.

That candidate is rumored to be Abdullah Gul, AKP co-founder and former president. Gul can only be coaxed into the ring if assured of a reasonable stab at victory against Erdogan. A reformist widely respected in international circles, Gul is viewed as the candidate most able to draw conservative, pious voters away from the AKP as well as attract Kurds, who constitute approximately 18% of the electorate.