Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdoganin power for 20 years, began this Saturday his third term after being sworn in before Parliament in Ankara.
The 69-year-old head of state and re-elected for five years on May 28 with 52% of the vote, promised “assume their duty impartially” before the 600 deputies elected on May 14, in a ceremony broadcast live by the tucos television channels.
“As president, I swear to protect the existence and independence of the State, the integrity of the homeland, the unconditional sovereignty of the nation, the rule of law [y] the principle of a secular republic”, as conceived by Mustafa Kemal Ataturkthe founder of the Republic, declared the president, known for his defense of Islamo-conservative positions.
The investiture ceremony was attended by some 20 heads of stateamong them the Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduroand the Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Jens Stoltenberg.
After that act, in the rain, Erdogan visited Atatürk’s mausoleumwhere he briefly extolled “a new era”, pledging to “bring the victims of the earthquake home as soon as possible”.
At least 50,000 people died in the earthquake on February 6, which left millions of people homeless in the south of the country, of whom 3 million were displaced.
NATO and Sweden
The ceremonies will conclude at the gigantic presidential palace that Erdogan ordered to be built far from the center of the capital, where Erdogan will offer a gala dinner for NATO leaders and Secretary General.
Turkey is one of the 31 members of the US-led military alliance and maintains its veto on Sweden’s accessionclaiming that it offers refuge to opposition activists that Ankara considers “terrorists”.
Stoltenberg wants Turkey to lift its veto before the organization’s summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, in July.
Also attending the ceremonies were Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev; in addition to the prime ministers of Hungary, Viktor Orbán (also reluctant to Sweden’s accession to NATO) and of Qatar, Mohammed bin Abderrahman al Thani, who were among the first to congratulate Erdogan after his election.
Armenia and Turkey have never officially established diplomatic relations and their common border has been closed since the 1990s.but at the beginning of 2022 the first steps were taken towards a rapprochementdespite the support of the Turks for Azerbaijan in the territorial dispute of the Nagorno Karabagh region, which opposes Armenia and Azerbaijan.
active diplomacy
The presence of numerous African heads of state – from Congo, Senegal, Rwanda, Somalia, South Africa and Algeria – testifies to Ankara’s active diplomacy on the continent.
At night, the list of ministers that will form the Executive will be announced, which will offer a clue of the orientations chosen by the head of state to boost the country’s economy in crisis.
The name of a renowned expert and former employee at the American firm Merrill Lynch, mehmet simsekhas been circulating for several days for this task.
Former Minister of Finance (2009-2015) and then Deputy Prime Minister in charge of the Economy (until 2018), this 56-year-old economist should bring financial orthodoxy to regain investor confidence.
Türkiye suffers a serious economic crisis with inflation above 40%driven by the regular reduction of interest rates.
The local currency fell on Friday to more than 20.88 pounds per dollar, despite the billions of dollars invested in the campaign to stop its devaluation.
(With information from AFP)
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Source-www.infobae.com