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Turkey - Opposition: coups aren’t the way to topple AKP

TURKISH opposition parties were quick to condemn Friday night’s short-lived military coup — including those whose MPs face prosecution for sedition.

MPs from the pro-Kurdish HDP and the Kemalist CHP were recently stripped of their immunity from prosecution, and investigations for such crimes as insulting the president opened against them.

HDP co-chairs Figen Yuksekdag and Selahattin Demirtas said: “No-one should put himself in the place of the people’s will,” adding that their party was opposed as a matter of principle to coups under any circumstances.

Turkey “needs to embrace a pluralist and liberal democracy, domestic and external peace, universal democratic values and conventions,” they said. “There is no way but claiming democratic politics.”

The CHP said that Turkey had already suffered greatly during previous military coups.

The Communist Party (KP) rejected conspiracy theories — voiced by US-based exiled Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen, Syria’s Al-Thawra newspaper and elsewhere — that the government had staged the coup as a false-flag operation.

But it nevertheless warned that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP party would exploit the situation to “solidify its rule” and transform its “unstable Turkey into stability.”

The KP statement said: “Either the people of Turkey will organise and get rid of AKP or AKP’s reactionary policies will intensify, repression will increase, massacres, the plunder and theft will continue.”

The outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which broke its two-year ceasefire with the government last year, said: “Portraying … the fascist AKP dictator as if they were democratic after this coup attempt is an approach even more dangerous than the coup attempt itself.”

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