Online resources for Turkish politics, in English?

June 5, 2011 8:54 AM

Are there any good, clear English-language resources online for learning about and following the upcoming Turkish elections?

I got a quick and dirty rundown from a Turkish acquaintance, but would love more details, biographies of the PM candidates, polls, policies, etc. as the election gets closer.

posted by oinopaponton to Law & Government (3 answers total)

Best answer: You can get a lot of information on the background issues from Aengus Collins' blog Istanbul Notes--he hasn't been updating it very frequently recently (covering stuff at home in Ireland as well), but his posts are always thoughtful and very well-informed.

Kamil Pasha, the blog of Boston University anthropologist (and mystery novel writer) Jenny White, is updated more or less daily and often includes political stuff. The most recent posts are about Israel because she's been teaching a course there for the last few weeks, but as a rule the focus is very much on Turkey. It's a bit more scattershot and 'bloggy', though, with a lot of links to other articles, whereas the updates on Istanbul Notes, although less frequent, tend to be more in-depth and are all his own stuff. Istanbul Calling is somewhere in between. The blogrolls of all these people will lead you to other useful blogs and sites, such as The White Path--not a white supremacist website (!) but a translation of the author Mustafa Akyol's surname--or TESEV, the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation.

Looking forward to hearing any other answers--I was going to ask a similar question.
posted by lapsangsouchong at 10:31 AM on June 5, 2011

Response by poster: Wish there were more, but these are great! Thanks!
posted by oinopaponton at 5:05 PM on June 6, 2011

The Economist has just put up this quick guide to some of the parties and issues (there are a couple of maps, too). They publish quite a few articles on Turkey, and have been broadly supportive of AKP in recent years; this seems to be changing, though, for the perfectly good reason that as its hold on Turkish politics deepens AKP has shifted from being broadly a force for democracy in the country to being something of a threat to it.
posted by lapsangsouchong at 10:32 AM on June 12, 2011