Islamist Ruling Party Wins Turkish Election
Charles Johnson
Sun Jul 22, 2007 at 2:16 pm PDT • Views: 258
Turkey is slipping back into the grasp of Islamists, voting their way into the Dark Ages one election at a time: Turkey’s ruling AKP wins vote.
ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey’s ruling AK Party won a resounding election victory on Sunday, giving the pro-business, Islamist-rooted party a mandate for reform but potentially setting the stage for renewed tensions with the secular elite.
The result is a moral triumph for Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan who called early parliamentary polls after losing a battle with the establishment, which includes army generals, who did not want his ex-Islamist ally [Abdullah Gul —ed.] as head of state.
With nearly all votes counted, the AK Party won 47 percent, almost half as much again as in 2002, but a more united opposition means it may end up without many extra seats. Only two other, secularist parties crossed the 10 percent threshold into parliament — the nationalist-minded Republican People’s Party (CHP) on 20 percent and the far-right National Movement Party (MHP) on 15 percent. …
Voters seem to have dismissed opposition warnings that the AKP secretly sought an Iranian-style theocracy, despite mass rallies this year in defense of the rigid state-religion divide in Turkey, one of the Muslim world’s few democracies.
“The controversy which we witnessed about secularism versus Islam has not materialized,” Sami Kohen, a columnist for liberal daily Milliyet, told Reuters.
Don’t worry. It will.
Frank says: