Operations against PKK militants in SE Turkey kill 17

“The nation is waiting for this”, he insisted. While the elections have ensured absolute majority for the AKP by giving it 317 seats in the 550-member Parliament, it fell 13 seats short of the number needed to call for a referendum on reframing the constitution and increasing the powers of the President.

The outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) said Thursday it has ended a unilateral truce it had declared ahead of the weekend election in Turkey.

With nearly all ballots counted, the AKP had taken just shy of 50 percent of the votes, comfortably enough to control a majority in the 550-seat parliament and a far higher margin of victory than even party insiders had expected.

In a country that is no stranger to violence and political instability in recent months these two incidents are perhaps unsurprising and of little cause for consideration. But they should be.

According to Sentop, the process of drawing up a new constitution is not something that can be done in a single session and is rather a long-term project where the strategy of the AKP will be decided on the basis of developments.

“I hope that they won’t fail to make contributions for preparations for a new constitution in the new period and sit down at the table and solve this issue”, Erdogan said. Technically, the AKP is no longer Mr. Erdogan’s party, as the presidency is supposed to be politically neutral, but it is no secret that he is counting on a strong AKP to concentrate power in his presidency now that he can no longer be prime minister. There was black propaganda being disseminated about the presidential system before the June 7 elections. The president has been criticised for his seemingly neo-Ottoman inclinations and for building a massive, 1,000-room presidential palace in Ankara.

Erdogan has said the peace process, which Ankara launched with jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan in late 2012, has been consigned to the “refrigerator”. The President (and former Prime Minister) of Turkey has been deemed to be veering towards authoritarianism as his party used the state’s resources to repress and persecute the troika of his perceived enemies: the opposition political parties, the news media and the Kurds. The reasons for both the initial electoral shock and the subsequent pessimistic (from the perspective of AKP at least) projections for the November elections were manifold, as Erdogan’s persona and policies were deemed to be deeply divisive.

Daily clashes have been reported between PKK guerrillas and the Turkish army in and outside Kurdish southeast, after a two-year ceasefire was broken in July. “We simply tried to save our people from massacres”, HDP co-chair Selahattin Dermitas lamented in the aftermath of Sunday’s election. “Whereas in fact an executive presidency was even sought by former presidents Suleyman Demirel and Turgut Ozal simply because it is a more effective system”, said Sentop. Between March 2003 and June 2015, Turkey was largely peaceful, but this situation changed dramatically after the elections that produced the hung House. And while it has done well to open its doors to refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war – it hosts more Syrian refugees than all of Europe – it is known to re-deploy them as fighters in Syria.

Its young population and ability to attract worldwide tourists of all stripes keeps the economy ticking over.

There is growing belief that the AKP, secure in its strength after such a decisive election victory, will offer an olive branch to its political rivals in order to make progress in its attempt to introduce a new constitution. In a parliamentary system like Turkey’s, 49 per cent of the popular vote gives you a comfortable majority of seats, and so Recep Tayyib Erdogan will rule Turkey for another four years.