Epress.am News from Armenia
Turkey’s new parliament opened in a tense atmosphere on Tuesday as the main opposition party and Kurdish deputies boycotted the ceremony in protest over lawmakers kept in prison, AFP reports.
It was hardly the start Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan would have hoped for after winning a third straight term in power in Jun. 12 elections and promising to reconcile with the opposition for a 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 decision announced by Kurdish-backed lawmakers last week.
CHP deputies did attend the general assembly but refused to take the floor when invited to be sworn in.
Their Kurdish colleagues did not show up at all in Ankara, convening instead in Diyarbakir, the largest city of the restive Kurdish-majority southeast.
The protest cannot block the functioning 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 row.
Erdogan, who has shown little sympathy for the jailed lawmakers, hinted his party might eventually agree to discuss legal amendments to secure their release.
“Let them (the CHP) put forward their proposals first and we will speak afterwards,” Erdogan said, according to Anatolia news agency.
His deputy Cemil Cicek scheduled a meeting with CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu for Wednesday.
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.