A senior member of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has claimed that the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) is working to overthrow President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan by order of US President Joe Biden, local media reported on Friday.
“The CHP has its mind set on … carrying out an instruction given from a [presidential] palace. Which palace is that? It’s the White House, of course,” Muhammet Emin Akbaşoğlu, the AKP’s parliamentary group deputy chairman, claimed on Friday at a press briefing in parliament.
“No good will come to our country from the main opposition, which is working to carry out an order given by Biden’s office to overthrow Erdoğan’s rule,” Akbaşoğlu added.
The AKP member’s remarks came a day after CHP leader Kılıçdaroğlu was denied entry to the headquarters of the Education Ministry in Ankara, where he went with the aim of speaking to officials regarding allegations of favoritism in the appointment of public school teachers.
Referring to the incident, Akbaşoğlu said: “We can see that the opposition, especially Mr. Kılıçdaroğlu, aims to foment chaos as part of a strategy to prompt an uproar against the government. … This is destructive politics.”
After the results of the oral exams conducted Nov. 12-27 for the appointment of 15,000 contract teachers were announced on Dec. 27, thousands of candidates said they were eliminated in oral exams despite passing the State Personnel Examination (KPSS) with high scores, accusing the AKP government of favoritism and seeking to place their own people in the positions.
The CHP leader, denied entry to the ministry, whose gates were locked according to local media reports, made a public statement in front of the headquarters, vowing to provide legal support to those candidates who think they have been treated unfairly.
“If there is an injustice or unlawfulness here, if people’s rights are usurped, and it’s done by the order of the palace [Erdoğan], it’s my … duty to oppose it. Wherever there is favoritism at play, I have an obligation to oppose it,” Kılıçdaroğlu told reporters.
Earlier in December the CHP leader was also denied entry to the headquarters of the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) on the day the institute announced the country’s inflation rate, amid claims of manipulating inflation data for political reasons.
The rate of inflation climbed to 21.31 percent in December, up from 19.89 percent in October and the highest figure the country had seen in three years, eating into the incomes of Turks.
