Diyarbakir – Voters had many reasons
to back candidates from other parties – including a desire to blunt President
Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s hopes of using Parliament to entrench his own power.
But a senior member of Erdogan’s party had
another theory – it was the “Jewish lobby” and “Crusaders” who swayed Turkish
voters.
“There’s
an economic lobby in the world, which is under the hand of the Jewish lobby,
and these are the ones who want the AKP to fall,” Muhammed Akar, chairman of
AKP’s Diyarbakir branch, said in an interview with Foreign Policy. “Not only the
Jewish lobby, there is another movement – the Crusaders. Because the AKP
government is the voice of the Muslims in Turkey, and all the world.”
The magazine called the election results a “body blow” to
Erdogan’s party.
AKP
officials frequently blame Jews and outside “lobbies” for internal woes and
often resort to anti-Semitic propaganda and slogans.
During mass popular protests in July 2013, Turkey’s Deputy Prime
Minister Besir Atalay blamed Jews for fuelling the demonstrations.
“World powers and the Jewish Diaspora prompted the unrest and
have actively encouraged it,” Atalay said.
At the
time, AKP party mayor of Ankara also referred to the protests in Gezi as a “game of the Jewish lobby” in a Twitter message.
In the
past, Erdogan has blamed the “interest-rate lobby” as a destabilizing force in Turkey in an
apparent reference to Jewish global financiers.
Earlier
this year, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu also accused Jews of working to topple the Turkish regime.
“I
announce it from here: we have not and will not succumb to the Jewish lobby,
the Armenian lobby or the Turkish-Greek minority’s lobbies,” Davutoglu said at a party gathering in February.
Sunday’s election
results likely left Erdogan speechless, Bekdil wrote, and he won’t take the results
well. “He is the lone would-be sultan in a too-expensive and too-spacious
Ankara palace. The next few years will see his existential war against real,
quasi-real and phantom-like enemies.”
