The Turkish general elections, scheduled for June 7, may seem a long way away but this week\u2019s high-profile resignations of several bureaucrats with intentions to run for parliamentary seats have already started the ball rolling. The Supreme Election Board announced the eligibility of 31 political parties to contest the Parliament\u2019s 550 seats.<\/p>\n
A winning party has to have 276 seats to be able to form a government. If the previous election result is anything to go by, the opposition has a difficult task ahead. On August 10 2014, in the presidential election, the AKP candidate Recep Tayyip Erdogan received 51.79 percent of the vote. The joint candidate of the Republican People\u2019s Party (CHP) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu had 38.44 percent and the candidate for the Peoples\u2019 Democracy Party (HDP) Selahattin Demirtas had 9.78 percent.<\/p>\n
With the elections still four months away, it may be somewhat premature to speculate on the possible outcome of the vote, but in Turkey, nobody is really expecting a surprise.<\/p>\n
Presently leading the polls, the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) is likely to win a fourth consecutive term in June. It is also firmly controlling the media coverage, making it difficult to have an open debate and scrutiny of its policies in the run up to the election.<\/p>\n
Yet, even with a limited success of the opposition in highlighting the government\u2019s shortcomings, the ruling party should have plenty of electoral liabilities. The AKP government is going into this year\u2019s general election presiding over a major corruption scandal, a bitter infighting with its former Islamist ally, the Gulen movement, a messy and unsuccessful foreign policy and a clearly worsening economy. In any other country, only one of these issues would be enough to cause serious headache for the incumbent party.<\/p>\n
The leader of the Republican People\u2019s Party (CHP) Kemal Kilicdaroglu, speaking on the Turkish news channel NTV,<\/a> \u00a0on Wednesday, was doing exactly what an opposition leader should do. \u00a0Commenting on the resignation of the head of Turkey\u2019s intelligence service Hakan Fidan to run for the parliament as an AKP \u00a0candidate, he raised all the right and proper questions. Mr Kilicdaroglu explained why the top spymaster cannot be a \u201cpersonal secret keeper\u201d for a president in a democracy; why it was important to have an institutional and more transparent oversight of the national intelligence service; why it was crucial to hold a government accountable and the judiciary independent. He pointed to growing security concerns in the Kurdish regions of the southeast, where some towns and villages were becoming ungovernable. The government was refusing to give information to the opposition and keeping the public in the dark about the Kurdish peace process.<\/p>\n If you think the opposition has an arduous task dealing with the government, there is worse to come.<\/p>\n