Darkness in Ankara Erdogan takes aim at Turkey’s parliamentary democracy.

Posted By on November 8th, 2016

http://www.wsj.com/articles/darkness-in-ankara-1478564136

Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s efforts to undermine Turkey’s judiciary, media and other independent institutions were well under way long before July’s failed military coup gave him a pretext to quicken his pace. Now the President appears to be targeting parliamentary democracy.

Police raids in Ankara and southeast Turkey on Friday saw a dozen parliamentarians from the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party, or HDP, detained. Those arrested include HDP co-leaders Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag, who are charged with defying prosecutors’ orders to testify on terrorism charges and allegations that they are sympathetic to the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.

“Terrorism” is defined loosely in Mr. Erdogan’s Turkey. The HDP is an opposition party with 59 seats in Parliament that uses legal means to press for the rights of Turkey’s 14 million Kurds. Other “terrorists” and terrorist sympathizers include the more than 100,000 police officers, judges, professors, journalists and teachers who have been detained or dismissed since the coup, including the editor of Cumhuriyet, the country’s main secularist newspaper.

 The real reason for the assault is that the HDP is one of the few remaining political obstacles to Mr. Erdogan’s efforts to impose an autocratic presidential system. Those ambitions also predate this summer’s coup attempt. In the June 2015 general election the HDP expanded its support beyond its ethnic-Kurdish base by appealing to secular-minded urbanites alarmed about Mr. Erdogan’s drive toward an Islamist dictatorship.

The HDP’s strong performance in that election meant the President’s Justice and Development Party failed to garner the supermajority it needed to amend the constitution. A subsequent election saw the HDP’s support dwindle somewhat, but the party remains committed to blocking any power grab by Mr. Erdogan. CONTINUE AT SITE

 

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