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Strong and weak candidates for speaker of Turkish parliament

Türkiye Materials 29 June 2015 22:00 (UTC +04:00)
All political parties in Turkey, entitled to be represented in the country’s parliament, have already nominated the candidates for the post of speaker. The speaker of the Turkish parliament will be elected this week.
Strong and weak candidates for speaker of Turkish parliament

Baku, Azerbaijan, June 29

By Rufiz Hafizoglu - Trend:

All political parties in Turkey, entitled to be represented in the country's parliament, have already nominated the candidates for the post of speaker. The speaker of the Turkish parliament will be elected this week.

The ruling Justice and Development Party of Turkey has nominated Defense Minister Ismet Yilmaz, Nationalist Movement Party - former head of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu for the post of speaker. The Republican People's Party has nominated former party leader Deniz Baykal.

At present, Baykal temporarily heads the Turkish parliament.

The Peoples' Democratic Party nominated Dengir Mir Mehmet Fırat, the former deputy chairman of the Justice and Development Party. Later he joined the Peoples' Democratic Party.

Each party is confident that its candidate will be elected speaker of the parliament. Meanwhile, taking into account the past activity of the candidates, it is clear that there are both strong and weak political figures having no chance to hold this post.

Despite all his charisma and political experience, Deniz Baykal, who is temporarily heading Turkey's parliament, has no great chances to become the permanent speaker.

Baykal resigned from the post of the head of Republican People's Party in 2010 due to the scandalous video about his personal life. Interestingly, that time he accused Fethullah Gulen, but not the country's government of what happened. This incident became a serious blow for Baykal and he didn't show any political activity for almost five years.

Previously, the former head of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu was a single candidate in the presidential election from the Republican People's Party and Nationalist Movement Party. Despite Recep Tayyip Erdogan's victory, Ihsanoglu gathered the major part of votes in the voting held at Turkey's embassies abroad.

Despite that CHP and MHP will unlikely vote this time for a single candidate, such a possibility should not be totally ruled out. This gives Ihsanoglu some advantages as compared to the other parliamentary speaker candidates.

A little is known about the other parliamentary speaker candidate, Dengir Mir Mehmet Firat. But it should be noted that Firat is the co-author of the democratic settlement of the Kurdish problem, which kicked off in 2009, after which a part of the PKK militants left Turkey and moved to the neighboring Iraq.

In 2000, Firat was running to the president's post from the pro-Islamic Fazilet Party (Virtue Party).

However, all this doesn't give him any advantage.

Turkey's defense minister, Ismet Yilmaz, the parliamentary speaker candidate from the country's ruling Justice and Development Party, unlike the other two candidates, has more stable political views.

So, one can assert that the main race for the position of the parliament's speaker will be between Ismet Yilmaz and Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu.

However, Ismet Yilmaz is the strongest candidate for that position.

Edited by CN

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Rufiz Hafizoglu is the head of Trend Agency's Arabic news service, follow him on Twitter: @rhafizoglu

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