Turkey’s Ruling Party Loses Parliamentary Majority

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

[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.