Trouble?

The Justice and Development Party (AKP), which presently rules Turkey, lost its majority in the June election. However, it managed to have the parliament speaker elected from its ranks and called for Parliament to recess until Oct. 1. This means Parliament will not convene, pass any laws or change the course of the government. It will rule without any hindrance from the opposition, which garnered 60 percent of the votes. This also means that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will lead the country by using his influence on the AKP, which he has turned into a personal support group.
It is not a secret that despite the efforts of interim Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, who is holding coalition talks with other parties, Erdoğan is against a coalition government that might lead to the investigation of a multitude of allegations of graft and corruption involving his inner circle.

This requires early elections after laying the groundwork to regain the votes of the Kurds and nationalists who switched to the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) respectively.
The first requires ending the settlement process with the Kurds. Waging a war against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), criminalizing the HDP and pushing it under the 10 percent electoral threshold is the main scheme. One of the reasons why Parliament was forced to recess must have been to prevent the continuation of settlement process talks and change the exceptionally high election barrier.
It is argued that with the PKK's return to terroristic tactics the preferences of both Turkish nationalists and devout Kurds will change and their vote will return to the AKP. Unfortunately, the PKK took the bait and initiated a spree of violence that was expediently used by the AKP government to arrest its members in Turkey and to bomb its headquarters in Iraq. The next target is its affiliate, the Democratic Union Party (PYD) in Syria. This is a political strategy more than a military one, for Kurds have always been a security liability in the mind of the Turkish establishment.
In order to carry out this plan with international support, the Turkish government gave the US expanded access to the İncirlik Air Base to combat the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
Western circles are not altogether unaware of this tact. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg recently said on a Norwegian television program that years of progress in the “peace process” should not be renounced “because force will never solve the conflict in the long term.” As part of Turkey's tactic to topple the PKK, legitimized by supporting the fight against ISIL, Stoltenberg aired the skepticism of some NATO members during the July 28 meeting of the NATO ambassadors called by Turkey on the grounds that its national territory was under threat and the NATO collective defense system should be operationalized. This means that Ankara's solicitation of active military support from its allies to target the PKK under the guise of fighting ISIL is both transparent and unsupported. There is no doubt that the US government will not allow Turkey to target the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) in Syria and its military wing, the People's Protection Units (YPG), who are currently the best local allies of the US in the fight against ISIL.
Turkish policy in and towards Syria has also taken a blow from another ally of Turkey -- Russia. If the news out of Moscow on Aug. 3 in the Moscow Times (http://awdnews.com/top-news/) is true, Russian President Vladimir Putin broke accepted diplomatic protocols and personally summoned Turkish Ambassador to Russia Ümit Yardım to warn Turkey that the Russian Federation will sever diplomatic relations immediately if Erdoğan continues to support ISIL rebels in Syria, where Russia holds its last navy base in the Mediterranean sea.

The conversation turned into a fierce polemic. The Moscow Times claimed that Yardım has repudiated all Russian accusations, laying the blame on Russia for Syria's bitter and protracted civil war. Putin reportedly left all diplomatic pretexts aside and bluntly said, “Then tell your dictator president he can go to hell along with his ISIL terrorists and I shall make Syria into nothing but a 'Big Stalingrad' for Erdoğan and his Saudi allies are not more vicious than Adolf Hitler," in the two-hour closed door meeting with the Turkish ambassador.

Allegedly Putin added, “How hypocritical is your president as he advocates democracy and … condones all terrorist activities aimed to overthrow the Syrian president!” The Russian president continued by saying that his country would not abandon Syria's legitimate administration and will cooperate with its allies, namely Iran and China, to find a political solution to Syria's interminable civil war.
It seems the unelected and unendorsed Turkish government is losing on the international front while trying to win on the home front.

DOĞU ERGİL (Cihan/Today's Zaman)