Erdogan pays homage to Islamic idol on eve of Turkey vote
They are afraid of us, says opposition leader
The Civic Party, one of Hong Kong’s most prominent prodemocracy groups, voted yesterday to disband due to a leadership vacuum, after its members were squeezed out of local councils and charged under Beijing’s national security law.
Nicknamed “the barristers’ party”, it was founded in 2006 by professional elites – mostly from the legal sector – who wanted to promote democratisation and civil society in Hong Kong.
The party was among the last few standing opposition groups, as political dissent has been outlawed under 2020’s national security law, and civil society in Hong Kong has been forced underground or driven into exile.
Yesterday, 30 of 31 members at the party’s extraordinary general assembly voted to voluntarily wind up operations – a process that would take about a month to complete.
“After all the final procedures, the Civic Party will disappear from Earth,” said chairman Alan Leong.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan paid homage yesterday to his executed Islamic predecessor in an attempt to rally his conservative base on the eve of a historic run-off vote.
Erdogan’s visit to Istanbul’s Adnan Menderes mausoleum takes him back to the man he cited when he called early polls for May 14 in a bid to ease his way to an unprecedented third decade of rule.
Menderes was tried and hanged one year after the military staged a coup in 1960 to put Turkey back on a more secular course.
Erdogan survived a putsch attempt against his own Islamicrooted government in 2016.
The 69-year-old told his followers in January that he wanted to continue Menderes’s fight for religious rights and nationalist causes in the officially secular but overwhelmingly Muslim republic of 85 million people.
Erdogan paid a similarly symbolic visit to Istanbul’s iconic Hagia Sophia mosque on the eve of the first round.
His conversion of the ancient seat of eastern Christianity into a mosque in 2020 further elevated his hero status among poorer and more rural voters who have helped keep him in power since 2003.
Erdogan ended up beating secular opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu by nearly five percentage points two weeks ago.
But his failure to top the 50per cent threshold set up Turkey’s first election runoff and underscored the gradual ebbing of support for its longest-serving leader.
Kilicdaroglu has focused his campaign on more immediate concerns as he tries to come from behind and bring back power to the secular party that ruled Turkey for most of the 20th century.
He used a late-night TV interview on Friday to accuse Erdogan’s government of unfairly blocking his mass text messages to voters.
“They are afraid of us,” the 74year-old former civil servant said.
The episode highlights what opposition supporters – many of them liberal secularists who live in big cities such as Istanbul and Izmir – have been saying for years.