Political parties

Turkey under no circumstances should establish dialogue with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahçeli, the main political supporter of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's government, has said, stressing that the main objective of Turkish foreign policy should be to save Syria from the Assad regime.

Ekrem İmamoğlu, the main opposition Republican People's Party's (CHP) mayoral candidate for Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, visited Christian religious leaders for Christmas on Dec. 25 in Istanbul.

The National Liberal Party (PNL, opposition, ed. n.) will support an amendment to the Budget Law by which the state will be compelled to allocate 5pct of the gross domestic product to Education and Research, on Sunday wrote on her Facebook page, this party's first vice president Raluca Turcan.

If parliamentary elections were held in mid-December, GERB would retain its first position with 23.5% of the votes, followed by the Socialists (BSP) with 20.8%. These numbers are close to those received in the October survey by Exacta, when GERB had an electoral share of 23.7%, and BSP - 20.1%. The distance between GERB and BSP has remained unchanged since the beginning of the year.

National Liberal Party (PNL, opposition, ed.n.) leader Ludovic Orban stated on Thursday night that the Social Democratic Party has pardoned the convictions for corruption deeds through the Constitutional Court regarding the setting up of new five-judge panels with the High Court of Cassation and Justice (ICCJ).

New Democracy has seen its popularity rise by one point to 10.5 percent against ruling SYRIZA in the latest opinion poll by Pulse, as 33.5 percent of respondents said they would vote for the conservatives if elections were held now, against 23 percent who would cast ballots for SYRIZA.

The joint plenary session of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate rejected on Thursday the censure motion called "Enough! The Dragnea - Dancila Government, Romania's shame!," initiated by the National Liberal Party (PNL), the Save Romania Union (USR) and the People's Movement Party (PMP).

Hungarian Democratic Union of Romania (UDMR) head Kelemen Hunor on Thursday stated that the Opposition doesn't have a governing programme with a proposed Prime Minister, and the Union will prepare such programme in the spring and it will also bring a proposal for a Prime Minister at that point.

Main opposition leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on Tuesday his party will reject the government's 2019 draft budget which will be voted on by Greek lawmakers later in the night, saying it is neither credible, nor growth-oriented.

The main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) has nominated Ekrem İmamoğlu, the mayor of Istanbul's Beylikdüzü district, to run for Istanbul province in the upcoming local elections in March 2019, while announcing Mansur Yavaş, a former CHP mayoral candidate for 2014 elections, to run for Ankara, the country's capital city.