Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will be sworn in for his third consecutive term on Saturday after winning a runoff election last weekend.
The inauguration in the capital, Ankara, will be followed by a lavish ceremony attended by world leaders as well as NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg.
Erdogan’s new five-year mandate will allow him to pursue a more authoritarian program at home while charting an independent path as a regional military power amid global crises such as the invasion of Russia in Ukraine and the conflict in Syria.
His new government will also oversee reconstruction efforts after a devastating series of earthquakes in February that killed 50,000 people and leveled entire cities in the southeast. part of the country – a disaster he widely condemned.
What’s on the agenda?
Erdogan will first swear in parliament at 3 pm local time (1200 UTC) and will receive his mandate from interim speaker Devlet Bahceli.
Afterwards, he will attend a ceremony at the Presidential Palace followed by a dinner attended by 21 heads of state and 13 prime ministers, as well as high-level officials from other countries such as the United States United States and China.
Leaders scheduled to attend include Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mahmud.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan also confirmed he will attend, in what is the latest sign of a thaw between the two arch-enemies, who have yet to establish diplomatic ties.
The Turkish leader is expected to announce his new Cabinet after dinner.
Stoltenberg looks at NATO talks
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg will attend the ceremony, and he will also hold bilateral talks with Erdogan on Sunday.
Turkey is in the spotlight after Finland and Sweden moved to join NATO after Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Ankara was one of the last NATO members to sign Finland’s membership in March. But it has withheld Sweden’s permission to join because of Stockholm’s reluctance to extradite exiled members of Kurdish groups Turkey claims are “terrorists” in the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). .
The secretary general of NATO previously said that his visit to Turkey aimed to “ensure the fastest possible entry of Sweden” into the military alliance, ideally during the next leaders’ summit in July.
“My message is that Sweden has given, and the time has come for Sweden to approve,” Stoltenberg told reporters on Thursday.
Stoltenberg was accompanied by former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt.
Cabinet to be announced
Erdogan is scheduled to announce his new Cabinet later on Saturday evening.
Top of his priorities are solving Turkey’s economic problems and a cost-of-living crisis that analysts blame on the Turkish president’s unconventional economic policies.
Media outlets including Bloomberg and Reuters have reported that former Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek, a former Merrill Lynch economist known for his more conventional approach to markets, is likely to play a role in the new government. .
“Erdogan’s government seems to continue with an orthodox stabilization program,” Alp Erinc Yeldan, economics professor at Kadir Has University in Istanbul, told AFP news agency.
“What we see now is that the news about Mehmet Simsek and his team was greeted with enthusiasm in the markets.”
In his victory speech last Sunday, Erdogan said inflation, which hit a 24-year high of 85% last year before falling to 44% last month, was the most pressing issue. in Turkey.
zc/rs (AFP, AP, Reuters, dpa)