Free Republic

Erdogan Germany has a well-known period in its history where it gave in to a dictator. Things didn’t work out so well for a lot of people. Now there’s another dictator exerting his influence, apparently. This time, the dictator is from Turkey. New York Times bestselling author and Christian evangelist Joel Richardson blasted German Chancellor Angela Merkel for approving a criminal probe against German comedian Jan Böhmermann. The satirist’s supposed crime is reading a satirical poem about Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Richardson, who highlights the plight of Middle Eastern Christians in his new documentary “Global Jesus Revolution,” said...

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (CN) – The case against a business associate of former national security adviser Michael Flynn went to the jury Monday, which will determine whether he illegally lobbied at the direction of Turkey without telling the federal government. During closing arguments Monday, prosecutors said 66-year-old Bijan Rafiekian tried to carefully mask who was behind a project he and Flynn worked on that aimed to discredit Fethullah Gulen, a cleric Turkish President Recep Erdogan has blamed for a 2016 failed coup against him. “They tried to subvert the American process so Erdogan could get his hands on Gulen,” U.S. Attorney...

Secretary of State John Kerry said this morning that the Obama administration is "open" to considering the extradition of a Poconos scholar accused by the Turkish regime of being behind Friday's coup attempt.Kerry said on NBC's Meet the Press that the U.S. has asked President Recep Tayyip Erdogan not to become more authoritarian in response to the coup.Hurriyet Daily News reported that Erdogan has detained some 6,000 soldiers, judges and prosecutors in less than 48 hours. They're being charged with “membership of an armed terrorist organization” and “attempting to overthrow the government of the Turkish Republic using force and violence...

Anne-Marie Slaughter, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s director of policy planning, now denies she endorsed Today’s Zaman, the flagship newspaper of Fethullah Gülen’s Islamist cult. Here is a google cache record with Prof. Slaughter’s endorsement, and here is the page now, with Professor Slaughter’s endorsement excised. Professor Slaughter denies she made the endorsementThere are two possible explanations: (1) Professor Slaughter is being truthful, and Today’s Zaman simply made it all up. If so, this suggests that the ethics of Zaman and the organization which sponsors it are non-existent. (2) Professor Slaughter asked for the retraction only after learning about Today’s...

Former Arizona Senator and RINO Republican Jeff Flake who earned an appointment by Joe Biden as Ambassador to Turkey for his service to the Democrat Party began his tenure by interfering in the internal affairs of Turkey. His actions provoked a rebuke by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan who said he will not receive Biden’s appointee. Flake visited Republican People’s Party leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu at the center-left political party’s Ankara headquarters in late March. The visit conveyed a sense of U.S. support for his candidacy violating normal diplomatic protocol. Kilicdaroglu is Erdogan’s main opponent for the presidency, in the May...

A high-ranking official from Turkey’s second-largest state-owned bank was arrested in New York City March 27. On the orders of the acting US attorney for the Southern District of New York, Joon H. Kim, FBI agents arrested Mehmet Hakan Atilla, Halkbank’s vice president for international banking, for violating the US-led sanctions against Iran. The press release from Kim’s office accused Atilla with participating “in a years-long scheme to violate American sanctions laws by helping Reza Zarrab, a major gold trader, use U.S. financial institutions to engage in prohibited financial transactions that illegally funneled millions of dollars to Iran.” Zarrab, a Turkish citizen...

Our “ally” in Turkey continues to blaze a trail toward a future for his country that looks less and less democratic by the day. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s PK party didn’t fare all that well in the country’s recent round of parliamentary elections. They didn’t lose power, but there was definitely a shift in the electorate and opposition parties fared better than in previous years. One place where Erdogan’s candidates did especially poorly was in the major city of Istanbul. Erdogan’s party’s candidate for mayor was defeated there by Ekrem Imamoglu of the CHP party. That apparently didn’t sit well...

Turkey has been a mess for years under the increasingly despotic and incompetent leadership of Turkish President Erdogan. The economy has been declining and suffering major problems with inflation and a decline in the value of the local currency, the lira, and Erdogan has launched increasingly vicious crackdowns on the opposition while breaking ties with former allies like the United States. The Turkish people have finally gotten sick of this, and Erdogan’s party suffered a major electoral defeat last week in several major Turkish cities. Erdogan responded to his defeats about as well as you’d expect, and throwing around hysterical...

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - The Istanbul election board has rejected a bid by Turkey’s ruling AK Party to annul the local election in the city’s Buyukcekmece district, an AKP official told Reuters on Friday, after the opposition narrowly won the vote in the city.

A day after local elections, a mayor-elect from the opposition Felicity Party (SP) was physically assaulted by the former mayor of Diyarbakır’s Çüngüş district, a ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) politician, the T24 news website reported. SP mayor-elect Ali Suat Akmeşe was injured along with another party member and a policeman. They were airlifted to a hospital in Diyarbakır. According to a local SP official, the injured party member is in critical condition. “The AKP chairman [Recep Tayyip Erdoğan], ministers and [AKP ally] Devlet Bahçeli terrorized the society with their political messages and sowed the seeds of anger,” he...

The editor of the Washington Post said that Erdogan who failed in the local elections has now refused to make concessions on Russian missiles or Syrian Kurds. Trump's administration will have no choice but to treat him as a rival. The editor wonders how Erdogan will react to the people's rebuke to him,The editor of the Washington Post talks about the results of local elections in Turkey, which he sees as a referendum on Erdogan's increasing authoritarian leadership.The editor notes that Erdogan used all his cheap tools that would have led the country to explosion in an attempt to rally...

ISTANBUL — President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party said Tuesday that it had submitted challenges to election results that showed its candidates had been defeated in Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey’s largest cities, in local elections two days earlier that dealt a rare setback to Erdogan at the ballot box. The Justice and Development Party, or AKP, has repeatedly prevailed in elections since 2002 and was the leading vote-getter on Sunday. But its losses in major cities — including Istanbul, Turkey’s financial capital — were a significant symbolic defeat for Erdogan and threatened to weaken his powerful party machine, analysts said.

ISTANBUL — Voters headed to the polls across Turkey on Sunday in local elections that are seen as a critical test of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s nationwide popularity, especially in large cities, at a moment when Turks are expressing growing anxiety because of an economic downturn. A crackdown on the government’s opponents that intensified after a failed coup in 2016 has added to the domestic unease and has also troubled Turkey’s relationships with western allies, causing sharp fluctuations in the Turkish lira and putting investors on edge. Erdogan’s own position is secure. But the economic crisis and polls that suggest...

Turkey's top electoral body on Monday annulled the results of the March 31 vote in Istanbul, which opposition candidate Ekrem Imamoglu narrowly won, and scheduled a re-run for June 23. The loss of Istanbul — and the capital of Ankara — in Turkey's local elections were sharp blows to Erdogan and his conservative, Islamic-based Justice and Development Party, or AKP... The controversial decision has increased concerns over democracy and the rule of law in Turkey

ISTANBUL — President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party on Sunday was facing defeat in local elections in the Turkish capital, Ankara, and possibly even Istanbul, its largest city, a result that shook the nation as Mr. Erdogan suffered the first major electoral setback of his decade and a half in power.The municipal balloting around the country came nine months after national elections that extended Mr. Erdogan’s hold on power. It was closely watched as a barometer of his standing with voters after Turkey’s economy fell into recession and he assumed sweeping new executive powers.Mr. Erdogan claimed victory over all in the...

Recent row during a Turkish parliamentary commission meeting spoke volumes. “We are cleansing everybody,” said the legislative body’s chairman, a member of the Justice and Development Party. “Everybody” means all who disagree with the AKP. “Cleansing” is the pattern established by the party of dismissing “everybody” from state institutions, public office. With Turkey in the third year of the post-coup period, the purge has not slowed. Discontent is being voiced. “Look, esteemed chairman,” roared Kurdish MP Meral Danis Bestas, “when the time comes and when you become subject to criminal charges, I and my friends will not hesitate to come...

For years, explaining Turkey’s democratic travails seemed an easy task. There was the persistence of an authoritarian tradition, whose source was identified as Kemalism—the secularist-nationalist founding ideology of the Turkish republic—and which the military embodied. According to the conventional narrative on Turkey, with which anyone who has only casually followed international politics during the last decades will be familiar, the Turkish military had a mission—to “protect secularism”—which explained, so we were taught, its habit of overthrowing governments. All that was needed for Turkish democracy to flourish was the emergence of a force strong enough to end the tutelage of the...

According to a report by EU Analysis (EU INTCEN), the October 10, 2015 suicide bombing of a peace march in Ankara may have been committed on the orders of the AKP. An EU's official intelligence body EUINTCEN report, of which Ahval has obtained a copy, has suggested that the October 10, 2015 suicide bombing of a peace march outside the Ankara train station may have been committed on the orders of TurkeyÂ’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). The bombing, in which two bombers belonging to the Islamic State (ISIS) blew themselves up in the midst of a crowd made...

The perception of a severe decline in rights and freedoms has been a constant factor among international observers of Turkey in recent years, as seen in a steady stream of reports by reporters, rights groups and lawyers on the country now known as the world’s largest jailer of journalists. For Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, though, such criticism may as well have come from a parallel universe. Speaking to Judy Woodruff in a filmed interview for the U.S. channel PBS, Çavuşoğlu said that far from restricting citizens’ rights, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has in fact brought them...

It came out that Turkey hasn’t paid the salaries of the gangs it lets loose on Afrin for two months, saying “The spoils of war you got from Afrin will suffice you for a year”. Reports suggest that disturbance erupted among the gangs Turkey derived from Al-Qaeda, ISIS and Al-Nusra, as Turkey hasn’t paid the salaries of some of these gangs for the past two months while they attacked and invaded Afrin. Although the pay cut is said to be related with the economic crisis and rapid increase of Dollar in Turkey, it has been learned that the Turkish state...