Quick update as I have a very busy day ahead. (A US Memorial Day post may follow later today.)
(a) According to the Daily Telegraph, Turkey’s “democratic” Islamist leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan won the runoff election with a 52-48 margin over his secular opponent Kemal Kilicdaroglu, who already gave a concession speech.
Speaking outside his house on the Asian side of Istanbul, an ecstatic Mr Erdogan hailed the elections as a “feast of democracy” but failed to mention that he lost in the country’s three largest cities including Istanbul.
[…] Mr Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the Republican People’s Party, in a concession speech hailed about 25 million people who voted not only for him but for the promise to stem Turkey’s further decline into an autocracy.
“The main reason for my sadness is the much bigger problems that are in store for this country,” he said at the party headquarters in Ankara. “Our march will continue. We’re not going away,” he said.
(b) Meanwhile, in Israel, several laws proposed by far-right coalition partners were shelved outright by Netanyahu. As much as I consider anyone flying a “Palestinian” flag on an Israeli campus to be somewhere between dog excrement and Roger Waters (p*ss be upon him), I do not believe a law prohibiting its display and making it punishable by jail achieves more than moral self-gratification. The (now shelved) law curtailing foreign funding to “activist” organizations in Israel is one I personally support in principle, just at an inopportune moment.
The “judicial reform” is not officially off the menu yet, but Likud MK David Bitan claimed that its current form is dead on arrival, and that what ultimately will pass will be something much more moderate.
Jeremy Sharon in the Times of Israel sees something broader: that the number one concern of Israeli voters at present is the rising cost of living, and that Bibi is politically astute enough to see this and grabs the opportunity to pivot to that issue — and use them as a pretext to shelve or postpone the controversial and diplomatically costly.
Spin, strangeness, and charm 