Turkey’s Ruling Party Loses Parliamentary Majority

New York Times ^ | June 7, 2015 | By TIM ARANGO and CEYLAN YEGINSU

[Brad from Tennessee]

ISTANBUL — Turkish voters delivered a rebuke on Sunday to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as his party lost its majority in Parliament in a historic election that dealt a blow to his ambition to rewrite Turkey’s Constitution and increase his power.

The election results represented a significant setback to Mr. Erdogan, an Islamist who has steadily increased his power as president, a partly but not solely ceremonial post. After more than a decade as prime minister, Mr. Erdogan has pushed for more control of the judiciary and cracked down on any form of criticism, including prosecutions of those who insult him on social media, but his efforts appeared to have run aground on Sunday.

The election was also a significant victory to the cadre of Kurds, liberals and secular Turks who found their voice of opposition to Mr. Erdogan during sweeping antigovernment protests two years ago. . .

[elcid1970]

Erdogan has already purged the military of senior Kemalist officers.

A possible coalition of AKP & MHP needs to be watched closely.

Those photos are of mass rallies of Ataturk supporters which happened quite some time ago. Western Turkey is mostly secular, but eastern Anatolia is the darker side, Islamically speaking.

There is huge Islamist pressure to rededicate Hagia Sophia as a mosque which it was 1453-1935. If Erdogan orders it while saying it is the will of the Muslim majority, Turkey’s orientation will shift away from Europe and into the maelstrom of ISIS, Iran, & who gets to be Caliph.

And if Erdogan pulls Turkey out of NATO, then peace with Israel will end and it’s Katy bar the door.

But Turkey’s decades-long bid for acceptance in the European Union will be permanently trashed, too. Maybe there is still a Western-oriented middle class among Turks. And a military that has traditionally been the restorer of sanity in national politics.