A year of failures: Erdoğan losing his closest allies (3-4)
Wednesday 06/January/2021 - 01:36 PM
Mahmoud El-Batakoushy
In this episode of our series on Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, we will focus on the mistakes the Turkish president committed during 2020, ones that caused him to lose his closest allies.
Erdoğan did not learn a lesson from the defection of the most important members of his ruling party in 2019.
Senior members of the Turkish ruling Justice and Development Party resigned in droves at the beginning of 2020. Erdoğan tried to underestimate this. He organized a propaganda conference in Istanbul, in a desperate bid to rescue his faltering popularity.
Among the most outstanding figures resigning as part of this wave of resignations was the head of legal affairs at the branch of the party in one of the municipalities of the Turkish capital. This man said he would resign to start a new political career within the Future Party which was founded by former prime minister Ahmet Davutoğlu.
In June of 2020, the deputy head of propaganda at the party also submitted his resignation, without offering any explanations. He said he would stop working in politics.
In July, the party's MP in Diyarbakır also submitted his resignation, along with five municipality heads.
A Turkish newspaper said the five municipality heads ha submitted their resignations voluntarily.
The head of the women's section of the party in one of the municipalities of the southeastern city of Mardin also quit the party, along with 14 section members. All these ruling party members said they would join the Future Party.
Nonetheless, Erdoğan received his most painful blow when his son-in-law Berat Albayrak, who was the finance minister, announced his resignation on November 28, 2020. Albayrak made the announcement on Instagram, which is unprecedented in Tukish government history.
