Conservatism in Turkey

The Turkish Industry and Business Association (TUSIAD) re-elected Simone Kaslowski as its president on March 30. 

He has been heading TUSIAD since February 2020 after replacing Erol Bilecik.

Kaslowski is the CEO of Organik Kimya, a chemicals company.

Murat Özyeğin and Bahadir Balkır are the vice presidents of the association.

Turkey on June 16 remembered its ninth president, Süleyman Demirel, who passed away five years ago.
Demirel was ousted twice in military coups and survived an assassination attempt before dying of heart failure at the age of 91.
He was one of Turkey's most prominent center-right political figures, serving as prime minister seven times and as president from 1993 to 2000.

Turkey commemorated the 39th anniversary of the Sept. 12, 1980 military coup during which then-Chief of the General Staff Kenan Evren toppled the coalition government of Süleyman Demirel and dismissed the Turkish Parliament.

An Istanbul court sentenced 15 of 10 former staffers of the shut-down daily Zaman to a range of jail terms on terror-linked charges on April 30. 

On April 16, the Turkish public voted in favor of a set of comprehensive constitutional amendments that overhaul the governance system into an executive-presidency model, a move considered to be the beginning of a new era in Turkey.

I am sure President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is very sincere about his policy to build the "New Turkey" as a "better alternative to the old republic," as he is an idealist, after all. It is true that politics have always had idealism, without which nothing would change for the better or worse.

Some longtime figures in the cadre of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) have failed to walk with the party, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said May 2 on his way back to Turkey from his visit to India. 

When asked about a recent debate stirred among pro-AKP columnists, Erdoğan said one side of the debate comprised certain figures who supported the AKP in the past. 

I recently wrote an article about the sophisticated propaganda machine of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

An overriding issue that everyone is concerned about is whether the president will endorse a conciliatory rhetoric toward the other half of the nation, or will he totally ignore that segment?

If President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was acting like he was in the first years of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), we could have positively answered this question.

Turkey has been passing through one of the worst and complicated periods of its history. Nationalist analysts say that ever since the republic was established on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, this country had never had such a "multilateral" and "concentrated" existential threat. Yet, the same analysts agree that the worst is probably yet to come.