Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told members of his AK Party on Monday that Cyprus, Azerbaijan, Bosnia, and a str...

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told members of his AK Party on Monday that Cyprus, Azerbaijan, Bosnia, and a string of other cities and nations are counting on them, framing his party as the political guardian of a vast pan-Islamic world stretching from Gaza to Mogadishu. "Rest assured, you are Gaza's only hope. You are the hope of Damascus, which is rising up, of Aleppo, which is being reborn from its ashes, of Mogadishu, Khartoum, Beirut, Tripoli, and Tripoliania. Remember, Nicosia, Baku, Sarajevo, Skopje, Prizren, Baghdad, and Basra are looking to you," Erdogan said at a policy retreat in the lakeside town of Sapanca. The speech comes as speculation builds that Erdogan may use the AK Party's 25th founding anniversary on August 14 to call early elections. Under Turkey's current constitution, he cannot seek re-election if the vote is held at the scheduled date of May 2028, but an early election would reset that clock and allow him to run again. Calling early elections would require the support of 360 of Turkey's 600 MPs. Erdogan's coalition currently controls only 328 seats, meaning he is 32 votes short of the threshold he needs. His path is made easier by the state of the opposition. The main opposition CHP's leader Ozgur Ozel was removed by a court, its presidential candidate Ekrem Imamoglu remains in jail, and his replacement Kemal Kilicdaroglu has triggered a full-blown internal crisis, with several local mayors already quitting the party, including the mayor of Izmir. A separate detail from Monday's event raised eyebrows. The mayor of Sakarya, the wider municipality that includes Sapanca, has maintained on his official website for months that he studied at Famagusta's Eastern Mediterranean University in Cyprus. The university confirmed in February that Yusuf Alemdar, who belongs to the AK Party, never registered there, was never a student, and holds no degree from the institution. #Turkey #Erdogan #Cyprus