Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's third term got off to a turbulent start on Tuesday when the main opposition party and minority Kurds boycotted parliament's swearing-in to protest against bans on elected candidates. The boycott meant more than 30 percent of elected MPs refused to take their oath as parliament convened for the first time since the June 12 election in EU candidate Turkey, a country often cited as a model for democracy in the Muslim world.
Erdogan's AK Party, which has turned Turkey into one of the world's fastest-growing economies, had promised after its comfortable election win to seek consensus on a new constitution. But the boycotts by the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) and the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) could force mass by-elections and stoke separatist violence in the restive, mainly Kurdish, south-east.
The CHP won 135 seats in the 550-member parliament, while the BDP won 36. "We will not take the oath unless the way is open for all our deputies to take the oath," CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu said, after a court rejected an appeal for the release of two CHP candidates under detention without having been convicted.
Eight elected candidates - five from the BDP, two from the CHP and one nationalist - have been barred from taking their seats by courts for being in jail. Their seats will remain vacant. A ninth candidate from the BDP, the party supported by the bulk of Turkey's 15 million Kurds, had his seat stripped by the election board because of a conviction for spreading "terrorist propaganda". The seat was awarded to a runner-up from AK.
Erdogan's AK, a socially conservative party with Islamist roots, has 327 seats following the reallocation of the seat. Should other seats be given to AK as well, the disqualification of opponents could take it past the 330-seat mark, which would give Erdogan a large enough majority to call a referendum for a new constitution without the support of other parties. The Kurdish bloc's strong showing, up from 22 seats in the previous parliament, had raised hopes among Kurds that Erdogan would work harder to end the long-running Kurdish conflict and address Kurdish grievances in a new constitution.