Erdogan to AK Party: Nicosia is looking to you

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday told members of his ruling AK Party that Nicosia is “looking to you”, as he addressed a policy retreat in the lakeside town of Sapanca.

“Rest assured, you are Gaza’s only hope. You are the hope of Damascus, which is rising up, of Aleppo, which is being reborn from its ashes, of Mogadishu, Khartoum, Beirut, Tripoli, and Tripoliania. Remember, Nicosia, Baku, Sarajevo, Skopje, Prizren, Baghdad, and Basra are looking to you,” he said.

He added that his party is “a movement which receives the prayers and support of not only our own people, but also of hundreds of millions of our brothers and sisters in our shared cultural geography”.

Looking back to the creation of his party, almost 25 years ago, he said that “we opened a brand-new chapter in Turkey by founding the AK Party”, and that the party “introduced many innovations to Turkish politics” and “transformed Turkey”.

“It brought a new path, a new and original perspective to the political institution. In particular, we approached consultation with a different perspective and placed it at the very centre of our style of politics,” he said.

The 25th anniversary of the party’s founding will be marked on August 14, with some circles suggesting that the date and a planned celebratory event may be used to fire the starting gun for early presidential and parliamentary elections in Turkey.

Under Turkey’s current constitution, Erdogan cannot run for re-election as Turkey’s president if the next election is held at the end of his current term, with the currently foreseen date set as May 7, 2028. However, if the country’s parliament calls an election ahead of time, his current term will not be considered fulfilled, and he will be able to stand again.

The consent of 60 per cent of Turkey’s 600-member parliament – 360 MPs – would be required for such an election to be held. At present, Erdogan’s government commands the support of 328 MPs – 277 from his own party, 46 from the ultranationalist MHP, four from the Kurdish Islamist Huda Par, and the vote of Onder Aksakal.

While the Turkish government does have almost two years left to run on its current term in office, this year may be the optimal time to call an election, given that the opposition currently finds itself in disarray, with CHP leader Ozgur Ozel having been removed from his role by a court decision and the party’s presidential candidate Ekrem Imamoglu in jail.

The removal of Ozel from office and the installing of Kemal Kilicdaroglu – the man Erdogan beat in the 2023 presidential election – as party leader has provoked a full-blown crisis inside the CHP, with a series of local mayors leaving the party in the aftermath.

Most notably, Cemil Tugay, the mayor of Izmir, the CHP’s historic stronghold, left the party, while Kilicdaroglu began relieving various chairpeople of provincial branches of the CHP of their duties.

Erdogan’s choice of Sapanca for Monday’s retreat is also noteworthy as the mayor of Sakarya, the greater municipality under which it falls, continues to lie about having obtained a degree from Famagusta’s Eastern Mediterranean University, despite the university having confirmed four months ago that he does not.

The mayor, named Yusuf Alemdar, belongs to the AK Party, and maintains on his official website that he studied in Cyprus.

However, the university confirmed in February that Alemdar “never registered with our university, was not a student of ours, and does not possess a degree from the Eastern Mediterranean University”.

“It is also clear from the statements made to the press by ‘Yusuf Alemdar’ that he does not have a degree from the Eastern Mediterranean University,” it added.