| June 10, 2011 - Turkey is in the final days of an election campaign that will affect one of America's biggest Middle East allies for years to come. The elections center around one party and one man -- Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In Istanbul, it's hard to escape posters of Erdogan, the head of the ruling Islamist party, the AKP. The polls point to a sizable victory for the AKP, and that would be the third straight election win for a party that worked hard to make one of the most secular Muslim nations on earth even more Islamic. "I don't think we're going to go to sharia law, but many people fear we are going more and more to our Middle Eastern roots," Cansin Ilgaz told CBN News. Political adversaries like Gursel Tekin, the No. 2 man in Turkey's main opposition party, say the world is now finally seeing the real Erdogan. "The dear prime minister in America and Europe was very popular and they supported him in 2004 and 2007 and his mask looked very liberal," Tekin, vice president of Republican People's Party, told CBN News while he was campaigning in Instanbul. "But now they see that he's not liberal," Tekin said. "He's restricted freedom and the journalists can't express themselves because of the prime minister. Therefore, the mind of Ergogan is fascist and it's a dictatorial regime." Some accuse the AKP of using democracy to gain power and then limit freedoms. CBN News asked Erdogan's second in command, Egemen Bagis, about those charges. "Turkey has never ... |
