Roundup: With new parliament in place, Turkey explores new gov't to tackle pressing issues

Turkish Parliament held its first post-election session on Tuesday, starting the process for a challenging task of forming a coalition government after 13 years of single party rule.

The new lawmakers took the oath in 550-member Parliament that was convened under the chairmanship of the eldest deputy Deniz Baykal who is a deputy from the second largest party Republican People's Party (CHP).

The new Turkish Parliament is more diverse than the ones in the past with women representation reaching to a historic high of 18 percent. The minority groups such as the Armenians, the Roma community, Yazidis and Circassians were also represented in the Parliament.

Baykal, acting as interim Parliament Speaker, delivered a speech at the opening session with strong emphasis on the rule of law, ethics, and the need to have a compromise.

"The parliament has a pluralistic structure to construct a new democracy," he said, calling for doing away with the polarization. The election campaign period was marked with significant tension on ethnic and sectarian divide.

Baykal also noted the importance of secular values as well as the independence of judiciary from politics.

The Justice and Development Party (AKP) that ruled the country for over a decade and its former leader and current President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has come under increasing criticism of interfering judiciary, stifling the corruption investigations and polarizing the nation along ethnic and sectarian lines.

The fact that Erdogan had campaigned heavily on behalf of the AKP in elections although he is supposed to be a neutral as president and should stay above partisan politics drew harsh criticism from the opposition parties.

Lawmakers from the opposition parties neither applaud nor stood up in respect to the president when he entered into the parliament to watch oath-taking ceremony on Tuesday.

The AKP lost the majority in the parliament in elections that were held on June 7. It has 258 seats while the CHP took 132 seats. The other opposition parties, opposition Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) have each 80 seats.

For the government to be formed under the constitution, any party or parties have to secure at least 276 seats in the parliament. Since no single party has that number of seats, they have to negotiate to form the government.

President Erdogan is expected to give the mandate to form the government to Ahmet Davutoglu, acting Prime Minister and the current chairman of the AKP soon after the parliament elects a new Speaker next week.

If Davutoglu fails to convince any opposition party to enter into a coalition government, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the CHP leader, will be tasked by the president.

If no party leader can come up with a deal to secure 276 votes in order to obtain a vote of confidence in the parliament within 45 days, president will call for an early elections.

The election of Parliament Speaker will be a first test to signal how political parties will act in a deal making process for the next government. The first round of elections on parliament speaker will be held next Tuesday.

The AKP as the leading party with more seats in the parliament can enter into a coalition with any of the opposition parties. Another possibility is that all three opposition parties may join forces to form a government, pushing the AKP into the opposition.

In any case, the next government in Turkey will have a long list of challenges to respond ranging from economic difficulties to security risks posed by terrorism and ongoing conflict in neighboring Syria.

CHP Parliamentary group deputy chairman Akif Hamzacebi said Turkey needs a strong government because there are so many issues that need to be addressed urgently.

"The nation sent a message to political parties to form a coalition government," he said, calling an early election at this stage as a betrayal to the voters' will.

In the meantime, dozens of Turkish civil society organizations issued a call to new legislators in the parliament to reopen the major corruption and bribery investigations that implicated senior government officials in 2013.

Opposition parties pledged during the election campaign that they will reopen corruption investigations that were stifled by the government. Endit