Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu paid a short but very important visit to the United States for talks with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on June 4. Due to his election campaigning, following his talks in Washington D.C., he had to immediately return to his homeland and constituency, Antalya. As a group of Ankara bureau chiefs of the media outlets, we had the opportunity to hold a press conference with him on June 5, only hours after his landing.
There are slightly more than three weeks to go until one of Turkey’s most important elections. Around 60 million people in the Turkish electorate will vote for the country’s executive-president and for the 600-seat parliament in the June 24 elections. With intensified pre-election rallies and political activities in the last few weeks, there are important snapshots about the polls and its results.
Hatice Genç was 19 years old, Hülya Genç was 9, Saime Genç was 5, Gülsün İnce was 28 and Gülistan Öztürk was 12 when they were slaughtered in an arson attack carried out by a neo-Nazi group in the German city of Solingen on May 29, 1993.
Amid sound and fury over looming key presidential and parliamentary elections, there are some very important developments in the field of foreign policy that carry the risk of further deteriorating ties between Turkey and the United States.
With just a month to go until the snap elections, all political parties are set to finalize their election manifestos, outlining the fundamental political lines they will pursue in the fields of the economy, social issues and foreign policy if elected on June 24.
Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahçeli has recently been making some interesting but worrying statements.
U.S. President Donald Trump will certainly make history as one of the most irresponsible and insensitive world leaders. His controversial decision to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem has already claimed the lives of dozens of Palestinians, further de-stabilizing the already fragile Middle East.
Turkey held its first popular presidential elections in August 2014. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, then prime minister and head of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), won the election with the support of 52 percent of voters against his two rivals, Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu – the joint candidate of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) - and Selahattin Demirtaş, the now-jailed former co-chair of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP).
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, chair of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), was the first presidential nominee to reveal his election manifesto through a big event in Istanbul on May 6.
