Recep tayyip erdoğan : Live Updates Every Minute from 25K+ News Agencies Across the Globe

EXCLUSIVE: White House sources tell Ian Bremmer the Biden administration will recognize Armenian genocide - the first US president to recognize genocide by the Ottoman Empire during World War 1. Ian explains in this Quick Take:
Hi everybody. Ian Bremmer here, kicking off the week. Gorgeous outside, it is spring, and I thought we'd focus today on some breaking news out of the United States on Turkey. Those of you following Turkey, know it's been a tough couple of weeks, couple of months, year for President Erdogan. A lot of things going wrong for Turkey right now. They just pulled their country out of the Istanbul Conventions, European agreement that meant to protect women. And he also just sacked his new central bank governor. That's four central bank governors in two years. The economy is not doing well. The Turkish lira is getting crushed, his domestic popularity not going well. And as a consequence, he's cracking down on the pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party, the HDP. In fact, they're making a legal effort to just close it down right now, the second biggest opposition party in the country and a bunch of other stuff.

The Democrats currently control the House, Senate, and White House for the first time in more than ten years. That enviable position, which came to them after unexpectedly winning two Senate runoffs in January, has allowed them to pass President Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion recovery and stimulus plan and to tee up another package of up to $4 trillion of investments in green energy and other priorities.
Democrats with unified control of government, a popular new president, and passing ambitious agenda items aimed at making a green recovery from a deep recession — sound familiar?
This is almost exactly the situation former president Barack Obama enjoyed in 2009-2010. But the rest of the decade was largely disappointing for Democrats. Though Obama was reelected in 2012, the party lost the House in 2010, the Senate in 2014, as well as 958 state legislative seats over the course of Obama's presidency. Donald Trump's win in 2016 — and Republicans' capture of the House and Senate — capped off this dismal period of Democratic decline. As in 2010, Democrats today face several converging threats to their ability to hold on to power. Unlike a decade ago, the party can see them coming, but internal disagreements and the persistence of the Senate filibuster may make it hard for Democrats to head off a loss of power, even though they currently control Washington. So what is it that they are worried about? To start with, the party in power almost always pays a price in its first midterms. This is as close to an iron law as exists in US politics. The only two presidents to break it did so amid seismic political events: Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934 at the height of the Great Depression, and George W. Bush in 2002 after the 9/11 attacks. What's more, Republicans at the state level have embraced voter suppression as a political tactic. In more than a dozen states under unified GOP control, legislators are considering measures to restrict access to voting. Most of these measures will disproportionately hurt the access of Democratic constituencies — Black people, young people, and the poor — to the ballot.These efforts are directly connected to Trump's false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and they're popular with the GOP base. Back in DC, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court is once again reviewing the Voting Rights Act, a landmark piece of legislation that offers broad protections for people's right to vote.. In Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, the court effectively overturned the act's Section 5. A case the court heard in early March could overturn Section 2, which allows legal challenges to voting rules on the basis of discriminatory impact. Challenges under Section 2 were crucial to Democrats' legal efforts to contest restrictive voting rules in the runup to the 2020 election. Democrats are also expected to lose out in the US's once-a-decade redistricting process, which determines the map of congressional districts. After huge Republican gains in state legislatures in the 2010 cycle, the GOP was able to draw favorable districts in key states, ensuring an advantage in Congress even in states where the partisan split was relatively even. Ahead of the 2020 cycle, Democrats identified this as a problem, but efforts to flip state legislative chambers last year mostly failed. As a result, Republicans will once again draw the borders for many more congressional districts that will take effect in 2022: 181, versus only 53 for the Democrats. Finally, Democrats have seen their demographic hopes thrown into question by the 2020 election. For years, Democrats had seen the US's changing demographics as a key advantage, reasoning they stood to benefit as the country became less white. But Trump, despite his frequent use of racially incendiary rhetoric, actually improved his position in 2020 with Black men (+6 percent), Hispanics (+4 percent), and Asian Americans (+7 percent) versus his 2016 performance, likely a result of a strong economy that ran closer to full employment than the US has in decades (until the coronavirus hit). That means that Democrats can't necessarily count on demographic change to inexorably shift big states like Texas into their camp. The Democrats aren't asleep at the wheel, of course. House Democrats have passed two pieces of legislation that could address some of these problems: HR.1, which sets minimum voting standards for states, and HR.4, which strengthens the Voting Rights Act. But Republicans are universally opposed to both, so neither can pass the Senate's 60-vote filibuster threshold for most legislation. That has strengthened calls for Democrats to reform or abolish the filibuster. Several Democratic senators have expressed a willingness to do so in recent weeks, but a critical group of moderate Democrats continues to defend the 60-vote requirement. One potential compromise could be a carveout from the filibuster for civil and voting rights legislation, but even that solution doesn't yet have the universal support it would need among Senate Democrats. Moderates — especially those from states that voted for Trump — face very different political incentives than their colleagues from safe Democratic districts, with their political futures dependent on their ability to distinguish themselves from the unpopular brand of the national Democratic Party. That gives them little incentive to support voting reforms that the GOP is already attacking as a nationalization of voting that opens the door to fraud. In the meantime, Democrats' sense of impending doom is pushing them to do as much as they can, as quickly as they can, trying to make as much policy as possible before they lose power. Democrats know that unless they can resolve the contradictions between the political incentives of moderates and progressives, they may be doomed to see history repeat itself.Jeffrey Wright is Analyst, United States at Eurasia Group.

Pulling India’s democracy back from the brink
Updated:
Updated:
Suggestions that its democratic credentials have been tarnished merit a serious, thoughtful and respectful response
Share Article
Suggestions that its democratic credentials have been tarnished merit a serious, thoughtful and respectful response
Governments, like the citizens that live under their influence, come in a dizzying array of types, challenging simplistic efforts of classification. In spite of all this variation, what remains constant is this: throughout history, governments wield considerably more power over the governed than the other way around. Actually that is a gross understatement. The vast majority of governments that have ever existed have enjoyed essentially unfettered power over their subjects. Of course, some rulers have been more enlightened and benign than others and grasped the insight that ruling is easier when one’s right to do so is viewed as legitimate than simply through coercion; but even such philosopher-kings were not above the exercise of arbitrary power when necessary. And these were the exceptions: most elsewhere, power was maintained and known by its iron fist.

Erdoğan has replaced top officials unsavory to the US and offered negotiations on the F-35 program in moves apparently to appease Biden.

Oct 23, 2020 5:56 PM EDT
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration on Friday slammed Turkey for taking a new step toward fielding a Russian-made air defense weapon. The U.S. complaint marked a deepening rift that threatens the future of a security relationship that has been central to the NATO military alliance for seven decades.
After Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan confirmed that his country had tested the S-400 air defense system and brushed off American complaints, saying, “We aren’t going to ask America,” the Pentagon hit back.
“The U.S. Department of Defense condemns in the strongest possible terms Turkey’s October 16 test of the S-400 air defense system,” the top Pentagon spokesman, Jonathan Hoffman, said in a statement. “We have been clear and unwavering in our position: an operational S-400 system is not consistent with Turkey’s commitments as a U.S. and NATO ally.”

A recent survey conducted in eight European countries provides a snapshot of citizens' views of their own countries' leaders as well as those who influence the future of the EU.

Though he's spoken to a number of world leaders since his inauguration, President Joe Biden has not yet had a phone call with Erdogan.

An der Boğaziçi-Uni in Istanbul protestieren seit Wochen Studierende gegen den von Recep Tayyip Erdoğan eingesetzten Rektor. Aber es geht um weit mehr als diese Person.

Biden pick McGurk seen in Turkey as an Erdoğan antagonist
McGurk. Photo: Jordan Pix/Getty Images
Ankara — The appointment of Brett McGurk as Middle East coordinator on President-elect Biden's National Security Council has already set alarm bells ringing in Turkey.
Why it matters: McGurk, who served as counter-ISIS envoy under both Barack Obama and Donald Trump, is considered a staunch critic of the Turkish government’s policies in the Middle East and an outspoken advocate of America's partnership with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to defeat ISIS.
The SDF is seen by Turkey as the Syrian extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has waged a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state.

Turkey expected China's Sinovac vaccine in early December, but it was weeks delayed. Some politicians suggested China was using it as leverage.

The decision by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sparked deep dismay among Orthodox Christians. Originally a cathedral, Hagia Sophia was turned into a mosque after Istanbul's conquest by the Ottoman Empire but had been a museum for the last 86 years.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan will visit Ukraine on February 3

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has warned Russia that Turkey was running out of patience regarding the continued offensive by the Syrian army in Idlib and will take unilateral actions to stop it if Moscow fails to persuade Bashar al-Assad’s regime to cease the military operations in the last rebel-held enclave.

Turkey's president said on Jan. 24 the recent 55-article peace plan was an important step towards restoring political stability in Libya, adding that the plan's success depended on its implementation in the field.

It came as no surprise. An opinion poll published this week in Greece showed that more than half of Greeks (54.6 percent) are “very much” or afraid “enough” of a “hot incident” with Turkey. Nothing unusual about that.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau held a phone conversation on Jan. 22.

Can the key external enablers of Libya's conflict also be peacemakers?

At international talks in Berlin, Merkel and Guterres lay groundwork for truce in long-running civil war.

The country's main opposition opposes the move and warned on Monday that the conflict could spread across the region. 

Rahşan Ecevit, veteran Turkish politician died at the age of 97 at a hospital in the capital Ankara.

The European Union has struggled to find a unified approach to the crisis in Libya, despite the country’s proximity to its shores.
Its inaction has increasingly left Turkey and Russia to call the shots in the oil-rich North African state — though their attempt to broker a long-term cease-fire stalled earlier this week.
However, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel has invited powers with a stake in the Libyan war to attend a peace conference in Berlin on Sunday, the latest attempt to resolve the nine-year conflict. Ahead of Sunday’s conference, here’s a brief guide to the Libyan crisis and the conflict’s international dimensions.

The Middle East has a new kingmaker.
For a quarter-century after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia was almost entirely absent from the region. Today, it has become a top player, with a formidable military footprint and good relations with all the major opposing protagonists, from Israel to Saudi Arabia.
Things certainly seem to be going Vladimir Putin’s way. The Russian leader celebrated Orthodox Christmas on January 7 with his first visit to Damascus since his air force began bombing rebel targets in 2015, to take full stock of Russia’s success in changing the course of the conflict.
It’s likely he was pleased by the visit. The rebels are now being pounded by airstrikes in their last bastion of Idlib (despite a recent cease-fire), the Islamic State is cowering in tiny remnants of its so-called caliphate, and the United States and its Kurdish allies have retreated to the far east of Syria, leaving Russian troops to take control of their vacant bases.

A workshop on the Kanal İstanbul project - a mega-infrastructure project involving the construction of a 45-kilometer shipping canal in Istanbul parallel to the Bosphorus Strait, was held by Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality on Jan. 10