The post Turkish Central Bank’s Reserves Likely Hit Fresh Record of $140B appeared first on Ankara Haftalik.
]]>The total reserves of the Turkish central bank are estimated to have reached a new historic peak in the last week, five bankers’ calculations showed on Tuesday, maintaining an upward trajectory after it embraced more conventional policymaking after the May elections.
The reserves jumped between $3.5 billion (TL 101.2 billion) and $3.8 billion in the week to Dec. 1 to exceed $140 billion, the calculations project. It would top the earlier record of $136.5 billion in the previous week.
The upward momentum has persisted since June after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan appointed respected veteran policymaker Mehmet Şimşek as Treasury and Finance Minister and former Wall Street banker Hafize Gaye Erkan as the Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye (CBRT) governor.
The new administration reversed a yearslong easing cycle and delivered aggressive interest rate hikes to cool demand and stem inflation.
Since June, the central bank embarked on a 3,150 basis-point tightening cycle – including hikes of 500 basis points in the last three months.
Including the latest rise, total reserves have surged $41.5 billion since June. Official data will be released on Thursday.
The five bankers provided Reuters with figures based on central bank balance sheet calculations.
Those calculations showed that net foreign exchange reserves were estimated to have fallen $1 billion last week to $35 billion after surging more than $40 billion since June.
On June 2, just after Erdoğan won reelection, the central bank’s net reserves were minus $5.7 billion, their lowest since data publication began in 2002.
Investors have been signaling a renewed interest in the major emerging market economy following the May vote.
Amundi, Europe’s largest asset manager, told Reuters it had started dipping its toe back into the Turkish lira. At the same time, central bank officials said funds are also beginning to arrive from large U.S.-based institutional investors.
Some large banks, including Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan, recommend that clients reconsider Turkish assets, with the former saying lira-denominated instruments may be one of the best trades among emerging markets in 2024.
Türkiye’s credit default swaps (CDS), which rose to 700 basis points at midyear, were down to 337 on Monday, data from S&P Global Market Intelligence showed.
The Treasury sold two-year benchmark bonds at a compound yield of 40.51% on Monday, up more than 30 points from the single-digit levels they had fallen during the elections due to regulations requiring banks to buy bonds.
Bankers said the latest auctions attracted foreign demand.
The Treasury will sell a four-year TLREF-indexed bond and a 10-year benchmark on Tuesday. It only plans TL 45 billion in domestic borrowing in December, but borrowing will speed up in January and February to total TL 388 billion.
The central bank has scheduled an “Investor Day” event for Jan. 11 in New York, adopting this format for the first time. While similar meetings are regularly organized by the bank, the theme of “Investor Day” will be introduced for the first time.
In early October, Erkan said there was a “multibillion-dollar offer letter on my desk that can directly enter our reserves.”
Before assuming the role of the first female governor of the CBRT, Erkan had worked in senior positions in the banking sector in the U.S., including 10 years at Goldman Sachs.
Meanwhile, S&P Global Ratings last week unexpectedly raised Türkiye’s sovereign credit outlook to positive from stable on subsiding twin deficits and affirmed its rating at “B.”
The move comes outside a strict ratings calendar and S&P said the deviation complies with recent policy adjustments.
The markets are anticipating further outlook and rating upgrades from credit rating agencies.
Source: Daily Sabah
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]]>The post Turkey to Hold Presidential, Parliamentary Elections on May 14 appeared first on Ankara Haftalik.
]]>Turkey will hold presidential and parliamentary elections on May 14, the country’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan officially announced.
“Our nation will go to the polls to elect its president and parliamentarians on May 14,” Erdogan said in a speech on Friday after signing the election decision.
The announcement was expected with Erdogan saying in a speech last week the Turkish nation would do “what is necessary” on the date now officially announced as election day.
The elections could be the country’s most significant vote in decades, with Erdogan’s two-decade rule of Turkey at risk.
The opposition has united around Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the second-biggest party in parliament, the Republican People’s Party (CHP).
However, another prominent opposition leader, Meral Aksener, initially opposed Kilicdaroglu’s candidacy as prime minister, voicing her doubts last week as to whether the former bureaucrat, regarded by some as uncharismatic, could beat Erdogan.
On Monday, Aksener announced her support for Kilicdaroglu.
Erdogan, whose popularity has waned as Turkey’s economic crisis continues, has been accused of authoritarianism by his opponents.
His government’s response to February’s devastating earthquakes in the southeast of Turkey, which killed more than 46,000 people and left hundreds of thousands living in tents or temporary accommodation, has also been criticised, although Erdogan has defended the government’s actions.
Erdogan, who has been Turkey’s leader since 2003, and has occupied the presidency since 2014, still retains significant support, and could yet emerge on top, alongside his AK Party.
Source: Aljazeera
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]]>The post Build that wall, Greek leader says ahead of election appeared first on Ankara Haftalik.
]]>Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has pledged to lengthen the fence to cover almost the entire length of Greece’s 192 kilometer border with Turkey by 2026. He also wants the EU to provide the funding, arguing that Greece alone should not bear the cost of protecting the bloc’s most problematic border.
And if the pledge to build a wall and make someone else pay for it sounds familiar, Mitsotakis rejects the comparison with Donald Trump, who won the U.S. presidency in 2016 with a slogan to do something very similar with Mexico.
“I don’t have thick blond hair, so I think the comparison is not particularly relevant,” Mitsotakis said in an interview last month with German newspaper Bild, published in English on the prime minister’s website.
He said the work was necessary to avoid another “organized invasion of illegal migrants into Greek, that means European, territory” — referring to an influx of migrants across the Turkish border in early 2020 after an EU-Turkey deal to control the flow of people broke down.
Greeks go to the polls on Sunday, May 21, in an election marked by public anger over a deadly train crash and an unpredictable new cohort of young voters. Mitsotakis’s New Democracy party leads in the polls with around 36 percent, but is likely to fall short of a clear majority. Syriza is running in second with 29 percent, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls.
Mitsotakis has called on Syriza to take a clear stance on the extension of the fence. “Will it tear down the fence by returning to open-border logic? There is no room for half-truths here,” he said during a recent visit to Evros, the province bordering Turkey.
He said the work was necessary to avoid another “organized invasion of illegal migrants into Greek, that means European, territory” — referring to an influx of migrants across the Turkish border in early 2020 after an EU-Turkey deal to control the flow of people broke down.
Greeks go to the polls on Sunday, May 21, in an election marked by public anger over a deadly train crash and an unpredictable new cohort of young voters. Mitsotakis’s New Democracy party leads in the polls with around 36 percent, but is likely to fall short of a clear majority. Syriza is running in second with 29 percent, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls.
Mitsotakis has called on Syriza to take a clear stance on the extension of the fence. “Will it tear down the fence by returning to open-border logic? There is no room for half-truths here,” he said during a recent visit to Evros, the province bordering Turkey.
Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras has said that the existing section of fence was already in place when he became prime minister in 2015, and he didn’t knock it down during four years in office. But extending it is not a magic solution, he said.
“The migration/refugee issue is much more complicated and if it could be solved with fences, Greece and Europe and the U.S. would have dealt with it. Trump was saying the same in Mexico, ‘the fence will save us.’ You can’t be saved by fences,” he told local Skai TV earlier this month.
The socialist Pasok party, polling in third place at around 10 percent, supports the extension of the fence. “Pasok initiated the construction of the fence, because for us both Evros and the sea have borders and must be guarded,” spokesman Dimitris Mantzos said.
Greece has been at the forefront of Europe’s migration crisis since 2015, when hundreds of thousands of people from Syria and elsewhere began entering the EU hoping to claim asylum. Many went through Turkey, either crossing the land border into Greece or making the perilous sea crossing to its Aegean islands.
An initial wave of public sympathy and an open-doors policy from many governments, including Germany, was soon replaced by a tougher line as the difficulty of vetting migrants’ refugee status and integrating them into European society became clear. The EU began taking measures to control its borders, including signing a deal with Turkey in 2016. But Turkey proved an unreliable partner — and may well continue to be, if President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan can best his rival Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu in this month’s election runoff.
Human rights organizations and the European Parliament have accused the Greek government of illegal “pushbacks” — forcing back migrants who have made it into Greek territory — and of deporting migrants without due process. Greece’s government denies those accusations, arguing that independent investigations by Greek authorities haven’t found any proof.
“We have followed a strict but fair policy, we have protected our land and sea borders, proving that the sea has borders and we can guard them. We have reduced flows by 90 percent,” Mitsotakis said on a recent visit to the Aegean island of Lesbos.
Gerald Knaus, an Austrian migration expert who led work on the 2016 EU-Turkey deal, said both methods were in play. “Clearly some walls stopped or dramatically reduced flows, but in combination with pushbacks,” he said. “In Greece’s case specifically, you can’t build the wall at the sea, where you have large numbers of arrivals.”
The question of whether the EU should pay for member countries’ border fences is a controversial one. While the migration crisis has stabilized since 2015, it remains a live issue — and that’s unlikely to change given the realities of climate change, war and hunger in the Middle East and Africa.
EU leaders in February pledged “significant” funds to bolster cameras and personnel at the frontiers, but stopped short of directly funding wall-building. A similar proposal was passed in the European Parliament in April, to the dismay of left-wing lawmakers. The possibility of EU-funded walls, once unthinkable, has entered the realm of the possible.
Knaus said it was “dishonest” to reject wall-building, which is legal, while allowing pushbacks, which are not. “By saying we don’t fund the fence, but we ignore violations of the rule of law, the [European] Commission is taking a very easy way out, as symbolic measure that has no real impact,” he said.
For Mitsotakis, it’s only fair that a collective benefit should be paid for by collective funding. “We are a frontline state, we are subject to significant migratory pressures, we expect help from the EU,” he said in the Bild interview. “It’s very unfair on the one hand, to ask Greece to do the difficult job of protecting the external borders and then pointing the finger at Greece because it’s simply doing the job on behalf of others.”
If he wins the election and the EU chooses not to fund the wall, Greece will go it alone, Mitsotakis said at a campaign rally: “The fence in Evros will be finished with or without European money.”
Source: POLITICO
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]]>The post Turkey elections: will the internet withstand the final round? appeared first on Ankara Haftalik.
]]>As the final battle for the Turkish presidency is getting closer, experts say Turks are on high alert for potential censorship and internet shutdowns.
Popular VPN service Proton VPN first registered a spike in sign-ups ahead of the first round of elections. The provider told TechRadar that the daily usage of its Turkey VPN has continued to soar.
This climate certainly doesn’t come as a surprise considering that current President Erdoğan is infamous for its strict grip on the internet, especially during times of political crisis. Here’s what’s at stake for people in Turkey in the next few days.
“Turkey’s history of internet shutdowns, coupled with the recent restrictions on social media, highlights the concerning trend of suppressing information during political unrest. This raises alarm over the possibility of further internet restrictions as the upcoming elections draw near,” Surfshark spokeswoman Gabriele Racaityte-Krasauske told TechRadar.
Turkey is the fourth-worst country in Asia by internet restrictions and first in Western Asia, Surfshark reports. The country counts, in fact, about 20 nation-scale mass-censorship incidents since 2016, according to data collected by UK-based internet watchdog NetBlocks.
The Turkish social media website Eksi Sozluk was restricted on the eve of the first round of elections. Some accounts and content was also taken down across online platforms like Twitter and Facebook recently. DDoS attacks on independent media sites during the election night and on the opposition’s electoral result monitoring platform after the vote counting have also bolstered concerns.
Despite these being relatively isolated incidents so far, Director of Research at Netblocks Isik Mater, who’s currently in Istanbul monitoring the elections, told TechRadar: “Turkish people are hoping for the best but expecting the worst therefore preparing for possible disruptions by seeking alternative communication channels and ensuring they have access to reliable news sources.”
The stakes are even higher this time, since whoever wins the polls on May 28 will govern the country for the next five years.
President Erdoğan, who’s been ruling the country for 20 years, can count on a solid alliance boosted by the recent endorsement of the third-place candidate. In the opposition there’s Kemal Kilicdaroglu backed by six allied parties. After the first round on May 14, the candidates received 49.5% and 44.9% respectively.
“The current climate across the country is quite grim. Regardless of who wins the election, they will inherit numerous challenges including economic struggles, humanitarian crisis across earthquake affected areas, and the refugee crisis,” explains Mater.
“People are anxiously awaiting the election results as they believe it will determine the fate of the country and access to information is a key part of that.”
Short for virtual private network, a VPN is security software able to spoof users’ IP address location so that they appear to be browsing the web from a completely different country within seconds. VPN services also encrypt all the data leaving a device for helping users enjoy better privacy when online.
No wonder there was a huge increase in VPN downloads during the election days. However, this time, the trend seems to have been a bit different than usual.
“Normally we see spikes in sign ups in the hours following government censorship of social media, news sites and other similar online resources. The Turkish elections were unusual in that we saw a significant increase in sign ups (44,000 daily sign ups at peak) ahead of the first round of elections,” a Proton VPN spokesperson told TechRadar.
“This would imply that people in Turkey were preparing themselves in case the government began a program of censorship. This also resulted in a spike in use, despite no increase in censorship that we are aware of, and today we still see daily use higher than pre-spike levels.”
As we have seen, Turks are increasingly turning to circumvention tools to be ready in case Turkish authorities decide to throttle social media access and internet connection during the crucial hours leading to Sunday evening.
Experts encourage people to download different services so that users can hop among them in case of blocks. We also suggest checking our guide on the best free VPNs to ensure you’re using a safe, high-quality product. On the other hand, Surfshark and some other providers are committed to supporting journalists, NGOs and activists in Turkey and elsewhere internet freedom is at risk, urging whoever is in need to reach out.
Racaityte from Surfshark said: “A potential internet restriction during the election could hinder the spread of crucial information that could shape the outcome of the election, undermining the very essence of democratic elections.”
Source: Yahoo
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]]>The post Turkey holds rates as economy walks financial precipice ahead of runoff election appeared first on Ankara Haftalik.
]]>The Turkish central bank’s monetary policy committee (MPC) on May 25 held its benchmark rate at 8.50%, the authority said in a statement (chart).
Turkey’s central bank and its policy rate, however, remain idle on the sidelines. The Erdogan regime conducts its monetary policy via macroprudential measures and non-capital controls.
Almost every day more macroprudential measures or non-capital controls, or amendments to already amended measures, are circulated by news services following briefings given by unnamed sources. Even the treasury departments at Turkey’s banks can hardly keep up with each announced move.
On May 3, the Turkish Statistical Institute (TUIK, or TurkStat) said that Turkey’s official consumer price index (CPI) inflation was recorded at 44% y/y in April compared to 51% y/y in March.
On May 4, the central bank left its expectation for end-2023 official inflation unchanged at 22% (upper boundary: 27%).
The guidance was based on the assumption that the lira would not experience another crash. As of May 25, the USD/TRY rate in the interbank market was up by 2% to TRY 19.93 from 19.49 on May 4 while free market prices at the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul hovered in the 21s.
The lira has lately seen more record-breaking decline. The latest USD/TRY all-time record in the interbank market, set on May 23, stands at TRY 20.32.
Amid the booming lira supply and hard currency outflows via record trade deficits, officials only keep the lira from entering into a nosedive by coercing bankers into blocking and gumming up domestic FX demand. Also supportive are unidentified financial inflows and support from “friendly countries”.
Another lira calamity would come as no surprise. It could happen at any time. Turks have been building up cryptocurrency, cars and gold as assets to prepare themselves for an upcoming storm.
The FX-protected deposits scheme (KKM) introduced by the regime reached $121.5bn as of May 19. The KKM has a 23% share in total deposits while the FX-linked deposits’ share stands at 40%.
The central bank’s net FX reserves have, meanwhile, fallen into negative territory for the first time since 2002. Gross reserves declined by $25bn in the last two months to stand at $102bn as of May 19 while net reserves excluding swaps broke a fresh record with minus $60bn.
The central bank’s net FX position also stands at a fresh record of minus $76bn.
To break the FX demand, the government has lately allowed local banks to offer higher lira deposit rates. As of May 19, the weighted average lira deposit rate with maturities up to three months reached 30.47%.
On Sunday May 28, Turkey will hold its second-round presidential vote runoff, with incumbent Recep Tayyip Erdogan up against opposition unity candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu.
Observers expect Erdogan to declare on the evening of May 28 that he has been re-elected. The so-called opposition in Turkey never challenges the election results, instead playing an active role to legitimise the officially presented outcome. The theatre of democracy in Turkey continues.
Though Turkey does have a habit for surprises, it currently seems that the Erdogan regime will still be in place on May 29.
In the period ahead, a currency devaluation looks a must due to the re-emerging side effects of the overvalued lira and the fact that the Erdogan regime will be in a position to find some FX supply. If the unidentified flows and the friendly country channels do not satisfy requirements, rate hikes could be on the cards.
On June 22, the MPC is set to hold its next rate-setting meeting.
The turbulence-free mood on the global markets, meanwhile, remains intact although the US government’s debt ceiling showdown between the Biden administration and the Republicans has not yet been overcome. So far, a “sell in May, go on holiday” market shake-up has not occurred.
Turkey’s five-year credit default swaps (CDS) have fallen below the 700-level, while the yield on the Turkish government’s 10-year eurobonds remains above the 10%-level.
On May 24, some unnamed sources told Bloomberg that Turkey’s central bank has asked some local lenders to buy the country’s dollar bonds to prevent a spike in CDS.
Source: Intelli News
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]]>The post Deepfakes, Cheapfakes, and Twitter Censorship Mar Turkey’s Elections appeared first on Ankara Haftalik.
]]>As the main candidates head to a runoff, disinformation is running riot on Turkish social media.
ON THE EVENING of Turkey’s most significant elections of the past two decades, Can Semercioğlu went to bed early. For the past seven years, Semercioğlu has worked for Teyit, the largest independent fact-checking group in Turkey, but that Sunday, May 14, was surprisingly one of the quietest nights he remembers at the organization.
Before the vote, opinion polls had suggested that incumbent president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was losing support due to devastating earthquakes in southeastern Turkey that killed nearly 60,000 people and a struggling economy. However, he still managed to secure just under 50 percent of the vote. His main opponent, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, who heads the Millet Alliance group of opposition parties, received around 45 percent, meaning the two will face off in a second round scheduled for May 28.
“That night we didn’t have much work to do because people were talking about the results,” Semercioğlu says. “Opposition supporters were sad, Erdoğan supporters were happy, and that was what everybody was mostly discussing on social media.”
It was a rare moment of respite. The days leading up to the vote and afterward, as the runoff approaches, have been intense at Teyit, whose name translates into confirmation or verification. The morning after the election, reports of stolen votes, missing ballots, and other inconsistencies—most of which proved to be false or exaggerated—flooded social media. Semercioğlu says his colleagues’ working hours have doubled since early March, when Erdoğan announced the date for the election. This election cycle has been marred by a torrent of misinformation and disinformation on social media, made more difficult by a media environment that, after years of pressure from the government, has been accused of systematic bias toward the incumbent president. That has intensified as the Erdoğan administration struggles to hold onto power.
“We have been working 24/7 for a very long time. Misleading information about politicians’ backgrounds and statements was prevalent in these elections. We frequently encountered decontextualized statements, distortions, manipulation, and cheapfakes,” Semercioğlu says. But this wasn’t a surprise. And, he says. “We are seeing a similar flow in the second round.”
Fact checkers’ work has been complicated by the willingness of the candidates—from the government and the opposition—to use manipulated material in their campaigns. On May 1, a small Islamist news outlet, Yeni Akit, published a manipulated video purportedly showing the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)—an organization designated as a terrorist group by both Turkey and the US—endorsing Kılıçdaroğlu. On May 7, the same video was shown during one of Erdoğan’s campaign rallies.
“It was surprising that Erdoğan showed a manipulated video showing Millet Alliance candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu side by side with PKK militants at rallies. It was a clearly manipulated video, but it was widely spread and adopted by the public” says Semercioğlu, adding that although it was debunked by Teyit, “it was quite effective.”
The video was widely circulated and made its way into search results for the opposition candidate.
“When internet users turned to Google to search for Kılıçdaroğlu on that day, the false news was among the top suggestions made by the algorithm,” says Emre Kizilkaya, researcher and managing editor of Journo.com.tr, a nonprofit journalism website. Kizilkaya says his research has shown that Google results are a primary source of news for Turkish consumers, “who typically lack strong loyalty to particular news brands.” During the election run-up, he says Google results disproportionately favored media that was friendly to the president.
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Kizilkaya, who is also the vice chair of the Vienna-based NGO International Press Institute (IPI) and the chair of IPI’s National Committee in Turkey, believes government propagandists have been able to dominate social media platforms with their messaging. “Pro-government trolls and bots, employed in the thousands since 2013, bombarded social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok with the fabricated video, which consequently garnered tens of millions of views” he says.
A third presidential candidate, Muharrem İnce, withdrew from the race only days before the election after an alleged sex tape was released online. İnce says it was a deepfake, which used his face and footage taken from “an Israeli porn site.” İnce, a longtime member of the Republican People’s party (CHP), took to Twitter to accuse Russia of producing the video.
Erkan Saka, professor of journalism and media studies at Istanbul Bilgi University, says the power of trolls may be overstated. The mainstream press reaches a larger audience, and much of it is friendly to the president. “The whole media establishment is in fact using disinformation,” Saka says.
The government did pass a new disinformation law last year, but critics say it has largely been used to attack the political opposition. On February 28, journalist Sinan Aygül was arrested in December 2022 over a tweet containing allegations about a sexual abuse case involving a government employee. He later deleted the tweet and apologized, but he was sentenced to 10 months in prison. In the same month, Kurdish freelance journalist Mir Ali Kocer was detained on suspicion of spreading fake news while covering the aftermath of the earthquakes in southeast Turkey.
“I didn’t see any pro-government person persecuted through that law, but some critical journalists are already in prison because of it,” says Saka. “There are definitely double standards, and it is mostly against the opposition. Of course, there are cases of disinformation, but the way this is criminalized is very problematic.”
Turkey ranks 165 out of 180 countries on the Reporters Without Borders world press freedom index and has fallen 15 places since last year.
The Turkish government has also been accused of using its powers to skew debate on social media. The country has blocked Twitter several times, most recently last February. On the eve of the election in May, Twitter agreed to block several accounts at the request of the Turkish government. Elon Musk, who was then CEO, defended the decision, saying that if the company had not agreed to the request, all Turkish users could have lost access to the service—but his critics say the platform helped the government censor opposition voices.
Censorship, and the skewing of the media landscape toward pro-Erdoğan outlets, means Turkish voters have few trusted places to turn to for information. “There isn’t a reliable media ecosystem in Turkey, and unfortunately this causes disinformation,” Saka says. “People are looking for information, and when you can’t find a good source, you go to social media, and there you will probably be exposed to some kind of disinformation.”
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With the runoff approaching, both main candidates are focusing their attention on courting nationalist voters. Erdoğan’s campaign continues to link his opponent to the PKK, while Kılıçdaroğlu’s camp is pushing a narrative about large-scale migration into Turkey. “They allow the infiltration of 10 million refugees into Turkey. If they stay, the number will be up to 30 million and threaten our existence,” he said in a video posted to Twitter.
A lot of the campaigning has moved to TikTok, Saka says, which has “become a viral source of disinformation” in recent months. “I believe we will have a very ugly week,” he says. “Voters nowadays are more vulnerable than before.”
The sheer volume of dis- and misinformation is a challenge for small fact-checking outlets. Teyit has just 18 full-time fact checkers, and 20 freelancers. “Even if you build a team of thousands of people, it is hard to overcome all of it,” Semercioğlu says.
During the election period, they post around 200 analyses per month. They’ve built a “statement control” feature on top of their website, asking readers to help them identify false statements made by politicians. And they’ve added a button so users can request corrections from politicians who post misleading information on Twitter. A lot of people have pressed the button, but, Semercioğlu says with some disappointment, the results haven’t been encouraging. “We would have expected more politicians to take action to correct misleading information.”
Source: Wired
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]]>The post Greece Elections has 36 Parties Vying for Seats appeared first on Ankara Haftalik.
]]>Frankfurt, Brussels (5/5 – 50)
Following the Greek Supreme Court’s decision released on May 2, a total of 36 parties and party coalitions will run in the May 21 Greek elections.
Of the initial 50 parties, coalitions, and independent candidates that had submitted applications, the Supreme Court rejected 14 parties, including “National Party – Hellenes”, which was founded by jailed neo-Nazi Ilias Kasidiaris.
Kasidiaris, 42, founded the party after receiving a 13-year prison sentence in 2020. He was convicted as a leading member of an extreme right party, Golden Dawn, which was blamed for multiple attacks against migrants and left-wing political activists.The party was founded as a neo-Nazi group in the 1980s but later claimed to represent a broader nationalist ideology.
The party officials have vowed to fight the ban in European courts. Opinion polls in recent weeks suggested the party would have done well enough in the election to be represented in parliament, with a projected 4% of voter support.
Greece’s Supreme Court banned the party from participating in the country’s upcoming general election based on legal amendments approved by lawmakers in February.The amendments disqualify parties led by politicians convicted of serious offenses or ones that would not “serve the free functioning of (Greece’s) democratic constitution.”
Due to these new terms, imprisoned Kasidiaris and his party are not allowed to participate in the May 21 election. The Supreme Court’s 9-1 decision to uphold parliament’s action could effect the outcome of the election, since the winning party would likely have an easier time forming a new government with fewer parties represented in the national legislature.
Previously, Greek PresidentKaterina Sakellaropoulou on April 22 approved a request by Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to dissolve the country’s parliament on April 23.The parliament was officially dissolved the next day, paving the way for national elections on May 21.
Mitsotakis, who will end his term in July, announced new elections for May 21 in March.He called on voters to look to other countries that have been caught in a cycle of elections that have produced no clear winner and left them without governments.
The 55-year-old followed in the footsteps of his late father, former Prime Minister Constantine Mitsotakis, and he remained popular during his term. However, Mitsotakis’ government has recently faced pressure over its handling of a deadly train crash. Saddled with problems like high inflation and food prices, a wiretapping scandal and other issues, his party is far from certain to win the elections.
Mitsotakis is seeking a second term in the election. His center-right New Democracy party is leading in opinion polls but suggest he is unlikely to achieve an outright victory.Mitsotakis’ conservative New Democracy (ND) party will face off against its main opposition, the leftist Syriza party which led the government from 2015 to 2019, under former Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras.
The vote will take place under a new proportional representation system in the 300-seat Hellenic Parliament — posing difficulties for any party to gather a majority and making two rounds of voting likely. The runoff election would probably take place in July.For the first time, Greeks living abroad will be able to exercise their right to vote in their place of residence, provided they meet the criteria set out in the relevant legislation.
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