12″ May-2023″
The campaign leading up to Turkey’s elections this weekend has been marred by outbreaks of violence across the country.
Incidents of stone-throwing, physical attacks on election workers and gunmen shooting up party offices have all been recorded in recent weeks as Turkey heads towards knife-edge polls in which President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is seeking to extend his 20-year rule
There are also concerns that the political rhetoric at election rallies could be igniting violence. Speaking at the weekend, Devlet Bahceli, head of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) that backs the government, denounced the opposition as “traitors [who] will get either aggravated life sentences or bullets in their bodies”.
In Turkey’s highly polarised political landscape, however, claims and counter-claims blur the facts surrounding incidents.
Savci Sayan, a parliamentary candidate for Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AK Party) in Izmir, western Turkey, said his campaign bus was attacked by opposition supporters on Monday night
A bloody past
Fears of political violence are very real in Turkey, where many remember the late 1970s when thousands were killed by political gangs. The bloodletting was stemmed after a military coup in 1980 but re-emerged when the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) launched its armed campaign against the Turkish state in 1984. Almost 40,000 people, the majority of them civilians, have died in that conflict.
Ahead of elections in June 2015, a bombing of a rally of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) in Diyarbakir, southeast Turkey, caused at least four deaths and hundreds of injuries.
Three years ago, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, now the main opposition candidate against Erdogan, was attacked by a mob while attending the funeral of a soldier in Ankara province. He was punched and had to seek cover in a nearby house as the crowd shouted, “Burn them, kill them.”
Erdogan also came close to being killed in a 2016 coup attempt that caused more than 280 deaths when rogue commandos stormed his holiday hotel in southwest Turkey.
In earthquake epicentre, Turkey’s Erdogan remains popular
We were all alone. It was raining and we waited for days in front of the collapsed building. No one came to help us,” says Fatma, who sits with other women at a soup kitchen set up in a large white tent in the courtyard of an empty building in Turkey’s southern city of Kahramanmaras.
That cry resonates across the earthquake zone, where President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government was accused earlier this year of a slow response to the disaster, and for lax enforcement of existing building regulations. “Where is the state?” people would ask over and over as they camped out in front of demolished buildings, waiting for the bodies of their loved ones to be pulled out