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Turkey heads towards renewed general election

Xinhua, August 25, 2015 Adjust font size:

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has decided on the "renewal" of the general election after the deadline to form a government expired following the June 7 polls, announced a statement from the presidency.

The presidency made the statement late Monday after a four-hour-long meeting between Erdogan and Parliament Speaker Ismet Yilmaz in Ankara, a day after Aug. 23 deadline to form a coalition government expired without agreement between the four parties represented in the parliament.

The council of ministers is now to resign and the president will appoint a prime minister to form a provisional council of ministers.

The caretaker government is supposed to be formed within five days of publication in the official gazette of the decision to hold renewed voting.

The June 7 election had caused the ruling AKP to lose its majority in parliament, but it did cause Erdogan to lose control over the political agenda in the country. He favored another election to try his chance once again and the country is going to another one.

Erdogan sees the Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party's (HDP) entry into parliament by exceeding the 10 percent threshold as the main reason the AKP lost its parliamentary majority, thus spoiling his calculations of exercising extensive executive powers if the country were to shift from a parliamentary model to a strong presidential model through a constitutional change.

East and southeast Turkey are the locations of the HDP's primary voter base. The collapse of the three-year-old dialogue between the government and the PKK, and also the de facto cease-fire, is not likely to boost sympathy towards the AKP in those regions anyway.

However, the composition in the parliament will not change radically in the new election, thus not promising the AKP a government of its own, and ignoring the security situation in the regions of HDP vote concentration.

The popular issue nowadays in the political backstage is whether the AKP would invite the HDP into the interim government, in which the CHP and MHP refused to take part. Endit