The politics of Turkey take place in the framework of a constitutional republic and presidential system, with various levels and branches of power.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, commonly referred by to his initials RTE, is a Turkish politician who is the 12th and current president of Turkey since 2014. He previously served as the prime minister of Turkey from 2003 to 2014 and as mayor of Istanbul from 1994 to 1998. He also co-founded the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2001.
The National Intelligence Organization, also known by its Turkish initials MIT or MİT, or colloquially as the Organization, is an intelligence agency of the Turkish government tasked with gathering information of national interests. It gathers information for the Presidency and the Armed Forces about the current and potential threats from inside and outside against all the elements that make up Turkey's integrity, constitutional order, existence, independence, security and national power and take precautions when necessary.
Ahmet Davutoğlu is a Turkish academic, politician and former diplomat who served as the 26th Prime Minister of Turkey and Leader of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) from 2014 to 2016. He previously served as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2009 to 2014 and chief advisor to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan from 2003 to 2009. He was elected as an AKP Member of Parliament for Konya in the 2011 general election and was reelected as an MP in both the June and November 2015 general elections. He resigned as Prime Minister on 22 May 2016.
The Republic of Turkey (Türkiye) and the United States of America established diplomatic relations in 1927. Relations after World War II evolved from the Second Cairo Conference in December 1943 and Turkey's entrance into World War II on the side of the Allies in February 1945. Later that year, Turkey became a charter member of the United Nations. Both countries advanced ties under the Turkey in NATO, G20, OECD, Council of Europe, OSCE, WTO, the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council, IMF, the World Bank.
Muhammed Fethullah Gülen is a Turkish Muslim scholar, preacher, and a one-time opinion leader, as de facto leader of the Gülen movement. Gülen is designated an influential neo-Ottomanist, Anatolian panethnicist, Islamic poet, writer, social critic, and activist–dissident developing a Nursian theological perspective that embraces democratic modernity. Gülen was a local state imam from 1959 to 1981, and he was a citizen of Turkey until his denaturalization by the Turkish government in 2017. Over the years, Gülen became a centrist political figure in Turkey prior to his being there as a fugitive. Since 1999, Gülen has lived in self-exile in the United States near Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania.
The Gülen movement, or Hizmet movement, or Fethullah Gülen movement, referred to by its participants as Hizmet ("service") or Cemaat ("community") and since 2016 by the Government of Turkey as FETÖ, is an Islamist fraternal movement led by Fethullah Gülen, a Muslim scholar and preacher who has been living in the United States since 1999. The movement is designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey, Pakistan, Northern Cyprus, and the Gulf Cooperation Council. Owing to the outlawed status of the Gülen movement in Turkey, some observers refer to the movement's Turkish Muslim volunteers as effectively a sub-sect of Sunni Islam; these volunteers generally hold their religious tenets as generically Turkish Sunni Islam.
Finland–Turkey relations are foreign relations between Finland and Turkey. Finland has an embassy in Ankara and an honorary consulate general in Istanbul and other honorary consulates in Adana, Alanya, Antalya, Belek, Bodrum, İzmir, and Kayseri. Turkey has an embassy in Helsinki. Both countries are full members of the Council of Europe, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the Union for the Mediterranean.
Operation Sledgehammer is the name of an alleged Turkish secularist military coup plan dating back to 2003, in response to the Justice and Development Party (AKP) gaining office.
So-called "Gülen movement" Schools are a network of private or semi-private schools founded by Turkish-Americans. Alp Aslandoğan, executive director of the non-profit organisation Alliance for Shared Values has said that the schools are independent yet indirectly tied to the Islamic Gülen movement on the "intellectual or inspirational level." In 2009, it was estimated that members of the Gülen movement ran schools that serve more than 2 million students, many with full scholarships. Estimates of the number of schools and educational institutions varied widely, with about 300 schools in Turkey and over 1,000 schools worldwide.
The Daily Sabah is a Turkish pro-government daily newspaper, published in Turkey. Available in English, Arabic, and owned by Turkuvaz Media Group, Daily Sabah published its first issue on 24 February 2014. The editor-in-chief is Ibrahim Altay.
The Democratic Progress Party was a political party in Turkey which adhered to liberal conservatism. It was founded by Kütahya Member of Parliament İdris Bal on 4 November 2014. Bal had left the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) in November 2013 after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan fell out with Gülen following the 2013-14 anti-government protests.
İdris Bal is a Turkish politician and academic who led the Democratic Progress Party (DGP) between 4 November 2014 and 31 March 2015. He serves as a Member of Parliament for Kütahya Province, having been first elected to the Grand National Assembly in the 2011 general election from the Justice and Development Party (AKP). He is seen as a close supporter of Fethullah Gülen, having left the AKP following a dispute between AKP Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Gülen's Cemaat movement in 2013. He founded the DGP in 2014, which is seen as the political force of Gülenism in Turkey. He is a graduate from the Faculty of Political Studies at Istanbul University and pursued a doctorate at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. He was a visiting academic at Harvard University in the United States and a lecturer at Başkent University in Ankara. He is married with six children and speaks fluent English. On 31 March, Bal resigned from his party and launched an attack against the Gülen Movement, accusing it and the government of censorship.
The following article documents the issues and developments that have formed the basis of the political campaigns and the news agenda in the run-up to the June 2015 general election and the November 2015 general election.
The political conflict between the AKP-ruled Turkish government and the Gülen movement of Fethullah Gülen began in 2013.
On 15 July 2016, a faction within the Turkish Armed Forces, organized as the Peace at Home Council, attempted a coup d'état against state institutions, including the government and president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. They attempted to seize control of several places in Ankara, Istanbul, Marmaris and elsewhere, such as the Asian side entrance of the Bosphorus Bridge, but failed to do so after forces and civilians loyal to the state defeated them. The Council cited an erosion of secularism, elimination of democratic rule, disregard for human rights, and Turkey's loss of credibility in the international arena as reasons for the coup. The government said it had evidence the coup leaders were linked to the Gülen movement, which is designated as a terrorist organization by the Republic of Turkey and led by Fethullah Gülen, a Turkish businessman and a well-known Islamic scholar who lives in exile in Pennsylvania. The Turkish government alleged that Gülen was behind the coup and that the United States was harboring him. Events surrounding the coup attempt and the purges in its aftermath reflect a complex power struggle between Islamist elites in Turkey.
Since 2016, the government of Turkey has conducted a series of purges, enabled by a state of emergency in reaction to the failed coup attempt in 15 July that year. The purges began with the arrest of Turkish Armed Forces personnel reportedly linked to the coup attempt but arrests were expanded to include other elements of the Turkish military, as well as civil servants and private citizens. These later actions reflected a power struggle between secularist and Islamist political elites in Turkey, affected people who were not active in nor aware of the coup, but who the government claimed were connected with the Gülen movement, an opposition group which the government blamed for the coup. Possession of books authored by Gülen was considered valid evidence of such a connection and cause for arrest.
Andrew Craig Brunson is an American pastor and a teaching elder of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. Brunson was an evangelical pastor of the Izmir Resurrection Church, a small Protestant church with about 24 congregants. German news service T-Online describes the church as having been held in a room in a tenement. Brunson was arrested in October 2016 in Turkey, where he had lived since the mid-1990s, for being associated with the Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ) and the PKK as well as espionage, during the purges following the 2016 Turkish coup d'état attempt against the democratically elected government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In 2019, Brunson published a memoir about his ordeal.
The presidency of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan began when Recep Tayyip Erdoğan took the oath of office on 28 August 2014 and became the 12th president of Turkey. He administered the new Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu's oath on 29 August. When asked about his lower-than-expected 51.79% share of the vote, he allegedly responded, "there were even those who did not like the Prophet. I, however, won 52%." Assuming the role of President, Erdoğan was criticized for openly stating that he would not maintain the tradition of presidential neutrality. Erdoğan has also stated his intention to pursue a more active role as President, such as utilising the President's rarely used cabinet-calling powers. The political opposition has argued that Erdoğan will continue to pursue his own political agenda, controlling the government, while his new Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu would be docile and submissive. Furthermore, the domination of loyal Erdoğan supporters in Davutoğlu's cabinet fuelled speculation that Erdoğan intended to exercise substantial control over the government.
Ahval is an Emirati-funded online news website that solely reports on Turkey. The site was launched in 2017. Turkish journalist Yavuz Baydar is the current editor-in-chief. The name Ahval means "events" and is a Turkish Arabism derivation from "ahwal".
