Erdoğan’s Hagia Sophia move signals snap election
The move by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to turn
the Hagia Sophia back into a mosque signals plans for a snap election, wrote
Yeniçağ columnist Orhan Uğuroğlu on Monday.
Turkey’s strongman has done a u-turn on a string of
subjects, including the status of the Hagia Sophia, pointing to panic ahead of
the next general elections scheduled for 2023, Uğuroğlu said.
On Friday, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan signed a decree,
handing over the Hagia Sophia’s administrative control to the country’s top
religious body after a court ruled a 1934 decree by the father of modern
Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, to repurpose the building as a museum was
illegal. The move, a long-time demand by Islamists, has been met with
international condemnation.
But a little over a year ago, the Turkish president was
singing a different tune, the Yeniçağ columnist said, recalling a speech from
March 2019, when Erdoğan said
transforming the 6th century UNESCO World Heritage Site into a mosque would
come at “a heavy price’’ for Turkey.
Moreover, Erdoğan accused those demanding the transformation
of having “no understanding of the world.’’
“As such, as a political leader I have not lost my way so
much that I would fall for this trick,” he said.
Erdoğan has since been forced to lose his way, Uğuroğlu
wrote, pointing to polls that increasingly show Turkey’s new political parties
founded by former Erdoğan allies eating away at the support his ruling Justice
and Development Party had.
Turkey’s strongman is also facing inflation, high cost of
living and rising unemployment as “having an increasingly crushing effect on
the country’s business owners, merchants and pensioners,’’ the Yeniçağ
columnist wrote.
Turkey’s main opposition secularist Republican People’s
Party has narrowed the gap with the ruling AKP to six percentage points, with
the parties seeing 30 and 24 percent support, respectively, according to a June
survey by polling company MetroPoll.
Ankara has repeatedly rejected talks of an early election.
