President Erdogan has said that he will hold a snap election on 1st November and in the meantime form an interim government.
Turkey’s election committee will set the official timing of the election after the deadline for creating a coalition government expires today.
Incumbent Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu formally ended attempts to find a junior coalition partner on Tuesday after weeks of talks with opposition parties failed. A snap election became virtually inevitable, after Davutoglu handed the mandate back to Erdogan.
On Wednesday, Erdogan said he would not hand the duty to form a new government to another party.
The elections should be held 90 days after being called, but the country’s election board can set it earlier than the official schedule in question.
According to the constitution, the AK Party will be able to continue as a minority government until elections if a majority in parliament votes in favour of holding early polls. In that case, the president has the right to call for early elections.
Both the secularist centre-left Republican People’s Party (CHP) and Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), the second and third largest parties in parliament, recently announced that they were not willing to form a coalition with the AKP.
The AK Party is unlikely to enter a coalition with the pro-Kurdish left-wing Peoples’ Democracy Party, the fourth party in parliament, as the government has been bombing Kurdish targets in northern Iraq as well as inside Turkey since last month.
Aljazeera
