Turkey’s new parliament opened in a tense atmosphere Tuesday as the main opposition and Kurdish deputies boycotted the ceremony in protest over lawmakers kept in prison. It was hardly the start Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan would have hoped for after winning a third straight term in power in June 12 elections and promising to reconcile with the opposition for a major constitutional overhaul, his key election pledge.
Shortly before parliament convened for oath-taking, the centre-left Republican People’s Party (CHP) announced its members would shun the ceremony, following a boycott announced by Kurdish-backed lawmakers last week. “We … will not take our oaths as long as our colleagues who have been barred from taking their oaths are not allowed to do so,” CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu said.
The protest cannot block the inauguration of the 550-member house, where Erdogan’s Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) has a comfortable majority of 327 seats — it is rather aimed at putting the AKP under political pressure to seek a solution to the controversy.
Lawmakers who are not sworn in cannot take part in parliamentary work.
Defying a 2007 precedent, the courts last week refused to free nine opposition lawmakers elected while awaiting trial in prison, and the electoral board stripped one of them of his seat over a terror-related conviction. Two of them, journalist Mustafa Balbay and academic Mehmet Haberal, were elected on a CHP ticket. They have been detained for more than two years on charges of involvement in alleged plots to destabilise and overthrow the AKP.
