WSJ
“There was a young man from Ankara …”
Teasing a certain sensitive authoritarian with the President Erdogan Offensive Poetry Competition.
“The very possibility of putting someone on trial for being rude about Erdogan is as illiberal or rather anti-liberal as these things come,” Mr. Murray wrote in the Spectator magazine. And so a few weeks ago he launched a devilish protest, the President Erdogan Offensive Poetry Competition, the ruder the poem (limericks preferred), the better. His aim, he said, was to contrast Britain with both Turkey and Germany—and to show the futility of authoritarian efforts to ban criticism.
Al-Monitor.com
What’s left of Turkish democracy?
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has stepped up his no-holds-barred offensive on Turkey’s sagging democratic traditions and institutions.
The option of getting the votes needed in the current parliament "could develop from the cooperation with the Nationalist Action Party (MHP), whose leader, Devlet Bahceli, has lately been flirting with the AKP to suppress the political rebels in his own party. Or it could develop from the jailing of a few dozen deputies of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), for links with terrorism and running a mini-election for the emptied seats, which the AKP is likely to win.
"The second option, yet another early general election, is what those in Ankara consider possible also. Accordingly, early elections at the right time — perhaps this autumn — could push both the pro-Kurdish HDP and the nationalist MHP below the 10% threshold, giving the AKP more than enough seats to present its new constitution, and the 'presidential system,' overnight."
