President Erdogan of Turkey will share power with a Kurdish party he claims are in league with terrorists after calling a snap election yesterday.
The Turkish leader was forced to call for a re-run of June’s inconclusive poll, which saw no party claim a majority or head a coalition.
Under constitutional rules, the parties in the Turkish parliament will have to share power in a broad proportional interim coalition until the election on November 1.
That means that Mr Erdogan and his prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, will have a potentially toxic union with the People’s Democratic Party (HDP), which the president has linked to the Kurdish rebel PKK movement that his government has been bombing in northern Iraq.
All other opposition leaders have refused to join the administration, leaving the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and HDP serving alone.
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Selahattin Demirtas, co-founder of the HDP, told reporters: “We will have no hesitation in participating in the government. Six million people voted for us and we have the right to have three ministers.”
The latest twist in Turkey’s quest to form a stable government underlines deepening political instability, with polls so far suggesting that the November poll may yield a result little different to the one in June when Mr Erdogan’s AKP lost its parliamentary majority after 13 years. It also comes after the collapse last month of a peace process with the PKK, which has reignited a 35-year-old conflict that has claimed 40,000 lives.
Mr Erdogan has called for MPs from the pro-Kurdish party, whose success in June was instrumental to his party’s defeat, to have their parliamentary immunity lifted and be prosecuted on charges of supporting terrorism.
However, after a closed-door meeting with the president, Mr Davutoglu called for all parties to co-operate in forming the interim government to “avoid steps that create the impression of a political crisis”. “I am calling on opposition parties to take on this responsibility together through challenging times for our nation,” he said.
Sinan Ulgen, director of the Istanbul-based think tank EDAM, said that the formation of the interim cabinet was Mr Erdogan’s “worst option” after opposition parties had blocked routes leading to a minority AKP government.
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Although the influence of the Kurds will be minimal, their inclusion may damage the AKP’s standing among nationalists whose support is crucial to the party’s success, he said.
“The AKP will now be criticised by the exact constituency they were hoping to recapture,” he said, adding that it was unlikely that the AKP would seek to exclude the Kurds altogether, since Turkey’s constitution forbids it.