Turkey’s opposition Future Party (GP) is talking with around 40 parliamentarians of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s governing Justice and Development Party (AKP), said Selçuk Özdağ, deputy chief of the GP.
The deputies who have spoken with the Future Party know that the AKP is being run badly and that they cannot win elections slated for June next year, Özdağ said in an interview with the Yenicağ newspaper published on Wednesday.
The GP has also spoken with about 20 former parliamentarians of the AKP, Özdağ said. He said he, party leader Ahmet Davutoğlu and other officials have been involved in the talks. The AKP won 286 of 600 seats in parliament at general elections in 2018.
The Future Party has the support of 1.1 percent of the Turkish electorate, according to a poll of 1,514 people in 28 of Turkey’s 81 provinces held by Metropoll in December. Özdağ said the party’s own polls showed that the GP had the backing of more than 10 percent of the electorate.
The survey by Metropoll showed that the AKP and its political ally, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) would fail to win enough combined votes to retain a parliamentary majority at elections if they were held immediately. Public backing for Erdoğan’s AKP stood at 32.3 percent compared with 27.4 percent for the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), 14.2 percent for the Good Party (IP) and 5.3 percent for the MHP.
Davutoğlu, a former prime minister in the AKP government, formed the Future Party in December 2019. He is liked by 18.4 percent of the electorate, the Metropoll survey showed. Among political party leaders, Meral Akşener, leading of the Good Party (IP) scored 38.5 percent, Erdoğan 37.9 percent, Devlet Bahçeli, head of the MHP, 31 percent, the CHP’s Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu 28.5 percent and Ali Babacan, the leader of the Democracy and Progress Party (DEVA), 23.5 percent.
Ahval