Despite Turkey’s troops motion in Libya, Erdogan’s reputation erodes

Mohamed Abdel Ghaffar

Turkey’s parliament has passed a bill that will allow the government to deploy troops to Libya to support the government of Fayez al-Sarraj and its terrorist militias that controls the capital Tripoli.

The recent decision by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warns of turning Libya into another Syria, suffering the same destruction in Damascus and other cities.

A total of 509 lawmakers attended the ballot in the 600 seats parliament, with 325 lawmakers voting in favor of the motion, while 184 lawmakers rejecting it, despite that Erdogan owns 344 seats under his control.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan knows very well his decline in popularity within his party as well as in the political forces allied with him within the Turkish Parliament, so he sought to persuade the opposition parties of his move towards Libya.

Erdogan has dispatched his Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu to Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, head of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) that owns 146 seats at the Parliament, to brief him on the reasons behind this decision, as well as the country’s national interests and threats.

Kılıçdaroğlu, however, rejected the proposal, stressing that priority should be given to diplomacy and that the party will not be part of a proxy war that will only make things worse.

Meral Akşener, the head of the smaller opposition nationalist Good Party, told a meeting of her parliamentary party that Turkey had no business risking the lives of its soldiers in a far-off civil war.

“We believe the bill will create a threat to Turkey’s national security, that it could lead to the needless deaths of Turkish soldiers, that the deployment of fighting forces to a land 2,000 km away is problematic and wrong, and that involvement in another Arab civil war like Syria will not benefit the country,” she said.

Speaking in parliament, CHP lawmaker Aykut Ünal Çeviköz has also said the bill did not touch on security, but instead talked of Turkey’s national interests without defining what they were.

“You’re setting out on a military operation, but your political objectives are unclear,” he said.

from August 2018 until July 2019, the AKP lost about 800,000 members, around 7.4%. That number is the net decrease. Data also shows that in the last two months, the party has lost over 56,000 members.  Another research also indicated a decline in Erdogan’s popularity by at least 36.3%.