Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to Islamic party wins in Turkish elections

Islamic parties and Islamic parties
dtb — (archived)

Erdogan's party is hardly the frightening sort. They've behaved quite responsibly in power, including good financial management, excellent economic development, improving relations with their minority Kurds (which has siphoned away a lot of support for the PKK among Turkish Kurds), and generally being a lot less corrupt and abusive than the last several secular governments have been. They've also eased out most of the members of parliament who voted against allowing U.S. forces to transit Turkey in 2003 and relations between his government and the U.S. are pretty good, other than (a big "other than"!) the Kurdish issue. As noted in the article you linked to and in more detail in a good story in the Economist recently, the strong opposition has mostly been among the Istanbul elite whose cronyist business dealings with the state have been threatened.

If you want to argue that's "bad news", then you really are sending the message to the Muslim world that as far as the U.S. is concerned *any* Islamic government is a bad government.

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