Fifteen parliamentary main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) lawmakers quit their party on April 22 and joined fascist İyi (Good) Party in a bid to secure the latter’s participation in the upcoming snap polls.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan this week called the snap parliamentary and presidential polls on June 24, bringing forward the vote by more than a year.
"Upon the instruction of our party’s leader, 15 of our friends joined İyi Party as a precautionary measure to prevent problems occurring right at the beginning of the election period," CHP spokesman Bülent Tezcan announced at a press conference in parliament alongside the lawmakers who resigned.
"Our friends are acting as shields against efforts to undermine democracy. They will go down in history as heroes," he added.
With the addition of 15 new deputies from the CHP, the İyi Party should have the requisite numbers to stand in the polls, CHP officials said.
The ultra-nationalist İyi Party, established last fall, has been facing eligibility issues before the June 24 presidential and parliamentary elections, including not having enough seats in parliament.
Parties with 20 or more deputies are recognised as groups in parliament and then automatically have the right to run candidates. The CHP has 116 members in the 550-seat parliament after the departures.
Akşener can run for the presidency even without her party, if she can get 100,000 signatures from the public.
In order to understand who Akşener is, if her connections to the unsolved political murders in the 90’s, the Susurluk case, her racist past are not enough, one can also look at her anti-women past as a "woman" party leader, as a friend of capitalists appearing at the congress with a worker helmet on her head, or the appraisals for NATO in her party program while pretending to be against the NATO bases in Turkey…
INTERACTIVE - Closer look at politics of fascist leader Akşener and İyi Party:
