Opposition İYİ party calls for early polls in 2021

A Turkish opposition party on Dec. 7 urged moving Turkey towards early elections next year.

"Let's make a medium-term budget. A medium-term plan and then let us prepare an exit plan for Turkey. Then, let us go to the national will, let us go to elections," İsmail Tatlıoğlu, head of the Good (İYİ) Party's parliamentary group, told lawmakers during the 2021 budget debate in parliament.

Tatlıoğlu said Turkey needs a new political atmosphere that leads the country to exit its current economic situation.

"As we've seen, without a new political atmosphere, Turkey hasn't been able to find a way out [from its current economic situation]," atlıoğlu said.

He added: "We can only get out of this poverty trap by changing the political will."

The İYİ Party's deputy chair, for his part, said that Turkey is growing poor, while its trade deficit gets larger.

"We are in the second rank in inflation worldwide. We can't produce any technology. In employment, we're breaking records in the republic's history," Erhan Usta said.

Turkey's unemployment rate in August was 13.2%, down 0.8 percentage points year-on-year, according to the Turkish Statistical Institute.  In July, the country's unemployment rate was 13.4%.

Also speaking during the debate, a top official of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) said his party supports the ruling party's policy in the Eastern Mediterranean.

"It is not acceptable to try to imprison our country, which has the longest coastline in the Eastern Mediterranean, to the Gulf of Antalya on the 'Seville map,' which is not binding in international law," said Levent Bülbül, deputy group chair of the MHP, which votes with the ruling AKP.

He criticized views that try to hem in Turkey in the...