I really do wish the US would bomb the f..k out of Turkey. It's insane around here. A good share of the electorate believes Erdogan is a world leader on par with Obama or Merkel or Putin and some even believe he is the next messiah. And unsurprisingly, afaik, his voters are only about 10% college educated.
A short recap of what's happening right now:
Facts:
- Erdogan is the president. As Turkey is a parliamentary democracy, his role should be to approve or reject legislation passed by the parliament (based on the constitution). What he is doing, however, is act as the leader of AKP and basically try to run the country himself including deciding on which laws the parliament should pass. The prime minister (Ahmet Davutoglu) is a puppet.
- Any political party has to pass the 10% threshold to enter the parliament, no threshold for independent candidates, therefore many Kurdish politicians entered the elections as independents and then formed a block in the parliament.
Why Erdogan has gone insane:
- The single party AKP government began peace talks with the PKK (Kurdish armed rebels) around 3 years ago. The talks included AKP, main Kurdish block in the parliament, jailed leader of PKK (Abdullah Ocalan) and the PKK senior leadership (based in northern Syria). The process was finalized a couple months before the general elections in June. A memorandum of understanding was declared.
- One of the results of the talks was that the Kurdish block would enter the elections in June as a party, not as independents. Erdogan was pretty sure they would not be able to pass the 10% threshold. But they did due to many of the non-Kurdish voters such as myself voting for them. They got around 13% of the votes.
- This derailed Erdogan's plans as the AKP lost the single majority of the parliament. AKP has to form a coalition with one of the other parties in the parliament: CHP (secular center left), MHP (nationalist center right) or HDP (liberal left Kurdish). AKP hasn't been able to agree on a coalition with any of these parties so far.
- This failure has pissed of Erdogan and the AKP so therefore they've decided to abolish HDP. They are the easiest one to push below the 10% threshold in an early election so they have decided to let their buddies ISIS do the job.
- ISIS used a suicide bomber in Suruc, Sanliurfa to murder 32 young Turks who were traveling to Kobane, one of the main battlegrounds between ISIS and Kurds in Northern Syria, to help rebuild it. These youngsters had collected donations in the past 3 months to deliver food, clothing and toys to Kobane. Sad. F'ed. Up. World.
- They couldn't blame this on the PKK because there were Kurdish people among the dead. They didn't need to anyway. They started to spread fear of other suicide bombers to form a public opinion that the military (TSK) needed to intervene in the ISIS affair.
- AKP consulted with the US and got permission (I am in no way tying any of this to the US, just stating what's been reported in objective papers) to do air strikes in Northern Syria. In return, it gave permission to the US to use Incirlik Airbase for ISIS related matters.
- TSK striked a couple of useless ISIS camp grounds to show off and then began a massive air operation to strike PKK targets. The goal here is to send a message to PKK that the peace talks are over. And the PKK was basically in a ceasefire mode until they got hit by TSK aircraft.
- So now the PKK has to hit back one way or another, which will in return help the AKP attack more PKK targets and also give a probable cause to arrest many of the HDP supporters who worked on the ground prior to the elections. This will weaken their organization structure so they won't be able to prepare as well as they did for an early election. It doesn't matter if they are guilty or innocent because the Turkish judiciary system is extremely slow and it would take 2-3 years for them to walk free.
- The public opinion will also sway away from the HDP because the HDP's main electorate is about 7% Kurdish. The rest comes from liberals such as myself because HDP was the only party who promised free speech, gender and sexual preference equality, press freedom, animal rights, etc. If the AKP can influence some of the people who voted for HDP in June, it would be enough to push them below the 10% threshold and then the AKP can win enough votes to form a single party government again.
Anyone wanna help me get a job in the US so I can get the hell out of this sh!thole? 31 yo, male, finance degree from Virginia Tech, 10 years consulting and sales experience. Ok thanks