CHALLENGES FROM ALL AROUND

Turkey will hold a second parliamentary election this year on 1 November. The president of the country, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, made a decision to this effect. He explained that inter-party negotiations had failed to produce a ruling coalition.

Meanwhile, the Turkish president approved the composition of an interim government headed by Ahmet Davutoglu, which will operate until the early parliamentary election. The new, interim, cabinet will include 11 members of parliament from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), two from the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), and one from the Nationalist Movement Party [MHP]. The rest of the portfolios will be distributed among independent MPs. The interim government will include a total of 26 people, including the prime minister.

The issue of creating a new lasting government after the election is important for Turkey not only in light of further running of the country, but also in the context of challenges that face Ankara, mainly geopolitical ones.

The question of whether the pro-Kurdish party will make it into the new parliament promises to be the main intrigue in the forthcoming election campaign. One can say without exaggeration that the success of the HDP in the 7 June election, which allowed it to overcome the 10-per-cent threshold and make it into parliament, has upset all plans of the traditional system parties, including AKP itself. The ruling party lost its absolute majority in the supreme legislative body, and thus the opportunity to form a new cabinet independently. Then followed a sharp aggravation in the political situation in the country, which faced another round of intensification in the activities of the Kurdish separatist movement, political support for which HDP is believed to provide.

The terrorist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) does not deny responsibility for the almost daily bloody terrorist attacks in different cities and provinces of Turkey. This is what gives grounds to President Erdogan and Prime Minister Davutoglu, who do not hide their interest in establishing a one-party AKP government, to base their calculations on the fall of the popularity of HDP. But experts and local politicians do not rule out that HDP, on the contrary, may strengthen its positions in the predominantly Kurdish-populated southeastern parts of Turkey.

However it may be, Ankara is determined to put an end to terrorists who threaten the security and territorial integrity of this country. It is to this end that the Turkish army has launched an anti-terrorist operation against PKK, with strikes being carried out primarily on bases of this criminal organization in northern Iraq. The main problem for Turkey is not only in combatting Kurdish terrorists, but also the fact that the fight against PKK involves serious geopolitical stress. The reason is the position of Turkey's NATO allies, who effectively disagree with Ankara's military operation against Kurdish terrorists.

In a bid to justify its support for the Kurdish movement, the West says that it is it who offers real resistance to the so-called "Islamic State" (IS), which is effectively in control of parts of Iraq and Syria. Turkey, in turn, makes it clear that it does not distinguish between threats its faces from PKK and IS, even if the latter two are enemies to each other. Therefore, by announcing the anti-terrorist operation, Ankara actually launched a war at two fronts, in the course of which more than a thousand PKK and IS militants have already been detained and a series of airstrikes have been carried out in parts of Iraq and Syria controlled by these two terrorist organizations.

Meanwhile, the danger threatening Turkey from "Islamic State" is becoming increasingly more impressive. Leaders of this terrorist organization have threatened Turkey that they will seize Istanbul, wage war against Erdogan the "traitor" and carry out terrorist attacks on polling stations during the upcoming election to the Turkish parliament. Realizing that the situation requires immediate counteraction to the terrorists, Ankara has agreed with Washington on all aspects of Turkey's official involvement in the US-led international anti-terrorist operation against "Islamic State".

As the Pentagon said, Turkey will soon begin to perform combat missions together with the air forces of other coalition countries, namely, carry out airstrikes on IS rebels' positions. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, for his part, has said that Turkey and the USA are preparing to conduct a comprehensive air operation against IS in Syria. It is expected that the area where strikes will be carried out will be parts of northern Syria which border with Turkey and which Ankara had planned to include in the so-called "security zone".

Undoubtedly, Turkey made its decision to join the international coalition not only under the influence of anti-Turkish threats coming from IS and the July terrorist attack in Suruc, which was carried out by radical Islamists and killed more than 30 people and triggered the current tensions in Turkey. One more reason is the position of the United States, which has increasingly more insistently been calling on Turkey to take more aggressive action against IS. Washington, of course, is not hiding its satisfaction with the fact that Turkey has allowed US warplanes to carry out operations from the Turkish air base Incirlik. However, as US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter aptly put it, "that's important, but it's not enough".

In essence, the United States views Turkey as the only real power that is capable of putting an end to the IS phantom by intensifying airstrikes on rebel bases and, in the future, perhaps by carrying out a large-scale ground operation in areas in Iraq and Syria controlled by the terrorists. The fact that Turkey's joining the international anti-IS coalition somewhat dragged out was not only due to Ankara's reluctance to get involved early in the now worst Middle East conflict, but also due to its attempts to bargain weighty geopolitical preferences for itself out of the West. One preference is about the above-mentioned operation by Ankara against PKK militants and the other has a purely Syrian dimension and comes down to Erdogan and Davutoglu's long-pursued goal to remove the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. In the context of the fight against PKK, Ankara continues to have to overcome the political resistance of the West, which views the Kurdish movement as an ally in shaping a new panorama of the Middle East. However, there is an almost complete understanding between Turkey and the United States regarding the implementation of anti-Assad plans.

By and large, the mission of supporting the pro-Western part of the armed Syrian opposition was one of the goals behind the deployment of US warplanes to Turkish air bases. Presently, by conducting anti-terrorist operations near the Syrian border Ankara seeks to put additional pressure on the Assad government. "This operation will also be a message to Bashar Assad and will help put pressure on his administration to make it sit down at the negotiating table (for talks with the opposition - Ed.) to find a political solution to the crisis," Cavusoglu said openly.

Ankara seems to be expecting the ground forces of the Syrian opposition to ensure security in the "zone" it has long been cherishing, and the air forces of the United States, Turkey and other coalition countries to give it air defence.

It is obvious that the war at two fronts - against PKK and IS - which Ankara has declared will be a priority in the activities of the future Turkish government that is to be formed following the November election.

There is no doubt that the new permanent Turkish government will be formed before the end of the year. Especially as the leading forces in the country - AKP, CHP and MHP, which are ready to join this year's second election race, cannot but realize that the presence of a strong executive power will, no doubt, be one of the guarantors of overcoming domestic political tension and foreign challenges facing Turkey.