williampfaff.com
Turkey's Election and Europe
on 2007/7/25 17:50:00 (43 reads)
By William Pfaff
Athens, July 24, 2007 – The crushing victory of the Justice and Development (AKP) party in Turkey’s parliamentary elections July 22, with a turnout of more than 80%, expressed a popular will by the Turkish electorate to achieve two seemingly contradictory objectives.
They endorsed the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who intends to go on pressing for Turkish membership in the European Union. They also conclusively expressed their support for the popular and middle-class religious movement that provides the AKP’s electoral base. In that respect, the vote implicitly rejected the secular republican values established in the 1923 republic by Kemal Atatürk.
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