Turkish voters have taken to social media to mock President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s absence since his ruling party lost its parliamentary majority in elections on Sunday with a clock recording the length of time it has been since he appeared in public.
His Justice and Development Party (AKP) is attempting to form a majority coalition government after only receiving 41% of the vote in the elections which saw an 86% turnout of those eligible to vote.
However Erdoğan, who campaigned for the AKP party before the polls opened despite the country’s constitution ruling that those in such a position be neutral, has not made a public appearance since the result was announced. The powerful former prime minister frequently delivered speeches throughout the campaign, sometimes up to three a day, but has only mustered a short statement after the victory.
Social media users in Turkey, who have frequently been blocked from using sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube by Erdoğan, have started circulating a ticking clock which shows how long “President Erdoğan has been off-air for”. At the time of writing, the timer stands at over two days and three hours.
The Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet led with the front page “Turkey is enjoying the silence” in reaction to his lack of public appearance. The paper’s editor, Can Dündar, is facing legal action from Erdogan for publishing evidenceof an arms transfer to Syrian territory by Turkish intelligence, the criminal complaint seeks a life sentence for Dundar.
In Erdoğan’s statement, he said that all parties should “preserve the atmosphere of stability” in the country and asserted that no party could lead the country alone. “I believe the results, which do not give the opportunity to any party to form a single-party government, will be assessed healthily and realistically by every party,” the statement read.
Ilhan Tanir, a Washington D.C.-based Turkey analyst, says that the Turkish leader’s decision not to appear publicly has offered opposition supporters the opportunity to laugh at his expense, bolstering their confidence after a result that “gives them new hope”.
“People certainly find new courage to speak up in this mocking,” he says. “People have been mocking president Erdoğan one way or another, so it is another part of the fun story of the election for the opposition groups and people.”
“He is president and he is supposedly impartial but he ran this campaign [for the AKP party],” Tanir adds. “Right after the election, he stopped going on TV, stopped giving interviews, so people are asking why he is not appearing anymore. The answer is he is disappointed.”
The AKP party’s loss of its majority in the Turkish parliament was facilitated by the entry of the Kurdish-majority People’s Democratic Party (HDP) into mainstream Turkish politics after passing the 10% vote threshold required.
Erdoğan was seeking a majority in order to further strengthen his presidential authority by rewriting the constitution, but decisions made by the AKP party will now have to pass through the parliament if the party decides to proceed as a minority government. This scenario is also likely if it forms a majority government with a coalition partner.
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Turkey’s currency plunges to all-time low after electorate vote for change in move that has exposed ‘existential’ threat to the country’s debt-laden economy
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, International Business Editor
Turkey’s currency has plunged to an all-time low as the country slides into political turmoil and its foreign debts turn toxic, becoming the first big casualty of the gathering storm in emerging markets (EM).
The lira slumped 5pc to 2.81 against the US dollar after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP party lost its decade-long majority in parliament, leaving the country bitterly polarised and without a clear government. The currency has now fallen 60pc since 2008.
Turkish companies were left heavily exposed as they grapple with record levels of hard currency debt left from an unchecked credit boom. Borsa Istanbul’s 100 index of Turkish equities fell 6pc.
“This is shaping up to be the proverbial perfect storm,” said Neil Shearing from Capital Economics.
“In emerging markets (EM) you can get away with bad macro-fundamentals if the politics are good, but once the politics turn ugly you can’t muddle through any more. We think Turkey is the most vulnerable of the EM countries,” he said.
Data from the Bank for International Settlements show that Turkey’s foreign liabilities have reached a net $430bn.
• Turkey election: What you need to know
Turkish banks alone must roll over $95bn in external debt over the 12 months. They may have to refinance just as the US Federal Reserve starts to raise rates for the first time in eight years and transmits a tightening shock through the global financial system.
“This is going to be existential for the Turks and I am afraid the crunch is coming soon,” said one hedge fund specialist.
“They have been running massive current account deficits for years and now they have lost control. They can’t devalue their way out of this because that will make it even harder to pay off the dollar debt. Turkey is trapped,” he said.
Ahmet Akerli from Goldman Sachs said the country’s gross external financing requirement has widened to 26pc of GDP this year – the second worst in the EM nexus after Malaysia – and the country risks a repeat of the two Fed-linked ‘taper tantrums” experienced in May 2013 and January 2014.
Central bank reserves are just $35bn, leaving a wafer-thin safety margin of just two months’ import cover. The ratio of foreign liabilities to reserves has reached 12, double the level in Brazil, Indonesia, and South Africa, which themselves are stretched.
The central bank has tried to steady the lira with direct intervention but analysts say the efforts are doomed without a sharp rise in interest rate, triggering a recession.
Fitch Ratings warned that political gridlock could lead to “erratic” policies, including fiscal slippage or political pressure on the central bank. “Further erosion of policy coherence and credibility would be negative for the sovereign credit profile,” it said.
The election is a victory for Turkey’s liberal and secular forces, and for the Kurds. It has become much harder for Mr Erdogan to change the constitution and establish an authoritarian presidency.
His AKP party is still dominant with 41pc of the vote and may have to form a coalition with right-wing nationalists, a combination that spells trouble for foreign creditors. It is still in power, but will rule a splintered country.
Mr Erdogan’s showcase “Muslim democracy” lost its shine long ago. His regime came off the rails altogether in 2013 when police fired on demonstrators in Istanbul’s Taksim Square and cities across the country, reportedly with live bullets, killing six and injuring 8,000. Amnesty International flagged human rights violations on a “huge scale”.
Mr Erdogan then purged prosecutors, judges and police, prompting warnings from EU officials that his government is in breach of the EU’s Copenhagen Criteria on democratic rights, and therefore that Turkey’s accession bid is in doubt.
The leader of the industry lobby group Tusiad was accused of treason when he alleged publicly that companies are routinely pressured by Mr Erdogan’s operatives through abuse of the tax system, and warned that the rule of law had broken down.
Turkey’s economic prospects have been deteriorating in parallel. The International Monetary Fund said in its latest Article IV report that the country could face a “sudden stop” in capital flows if global conditions tightened.
The net international investment position has worsened by 25 percentage points to 54pc of GDP since 2008 because of trade deficits and a chronically low savings rate, a textbook case of a country living beyond its means.
The IMF said the exchange rate is 10pc to 20pc overvalued. The banks’ reliance on external funding has jumped from 5.5pc to 18pc of GDP in five years. “These trends are not sustainable, and if they are not redressed, Turkey could sooner or later suffer a sharp adjustment,” it said.
Goldman’s Mr Akerli said the great spurt of catch-up growth in the early years of the last decade has sputtered out as total factor productivity growth turns negative and the country drifts into the “middle income trap”.
This is by now a common story in Latin America, Asia and the near East, where populist regimes have relied on credit growth to mask the lack of reform and obsolete development models.
The spillover effects from zero interest rates and quantitative easing (QE) in the US kept the illusion going for another three or four years after the Lehman crisis but the underlying deformities have become clear in a string of countries, including Brazil, Russia, and increasingly China.
Emerging markets have borrowed $2 trillion in US dollars since the Lehman crisis, pushing their total dollar debts $4.5 trillion. Much of it was borrowed at real interest rates near 1pc.
The IMF warned in April that those countries that drank most indiscriminately from this pool of excess liquidity in the QE era could face a crippling squeeze on two fronts and a “cascade” of woes if the dollar spikes yet higher and rates climb back to anywhere near historic norms.
By Glen Johnson and Patrick J. McDonnell contact the reporter
Turkish voters go to the polls Sunday in the culmination of an acrimonious election campaign pitting a fractious opposition against the long-dominant ruling party and the country’s most divisive figure: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The parliamentary vote, analysts say, could determine whether this dynamic nation of 80 million fortifies its vibrant democracy or slides further toward autocratic rule dominated by Erdogan, a charismatic leader who inspires fierce loyalty among supporters and revulsion from critics.
The president has called on the electorate to give his ruling Justice and Development party a supermajority in the parliament, which would facilitate constitutional changes bolstering his power as president.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan greets supporters in Eskisehir, Turkey, on June 5, 2015.
(Kayhan Ozer / Presidential Press Office)
However, polls have suggested that the party will garner 42% to 45% of the vote, which would be a significant reversal of fortune from the nearly 50% it took in the 2011 general election. A recent economic slowdown and increase in unemployment have unnerved many voters.
The election has been marred by violence, as tension and polarization sweep Turkey. On Friday, an explosion at a final rally of the People’s Democratic Party killed two supporters and wounded 100 in southeastern Diyarbakir, according to local news accounts.
The prospect of diminished support for Erdogan has raised hope among opposition blocs, including the upstart Peoples’ Democratic Party, or HDP, which has endeavored to expand its base beyond the nation’s Kurdish minority. The left-wing party aims to capture the votes of liberals who have grown disillusioned with both Erdogan and traditional parties, such as the center-left Republican People’s Party, the main opposition bloc.
“We have to make a new start by putting people at the heart of the system,” Selahattin Demirtas, HDP leader and human rights lawyer, said in April.
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Erdogan has demanded for months that his support base deliver a resounding victory for the conservative ruling party with Islamist roots. The party has ruled Turkey since 2002, presiding over a period of rapid economic expansion that also saw Erdogan increase the profile of Islam in a republic long torn between Islamic roots and secular present.
If the party can secure at least 330 seats in Turkey’s 550-seat parliament, critics say, Erdogan can rewrite the constitution and hasten the nation’s move toward authoritarian rule. A supermajority of 367 seats would allow the president to make the change without a referendum.
“He is establishing a system of personal rule,” said Ergun Ozbudun of Istanbul Sehir University, a leading constitutional law scholar. “What he desires is nothing like the U.S. system, as he does not care for checks and balances…. It is a system which we can no longer call democratic.”
But the president’s defenders deny any drift toward one-man, one-party rule and note that the Erdogan years have brought unprecedented prosperity to Turkey. Erdogan himself says the constitutional changes would spur growth and Turkey’s ascension as a global power.
“Erdogan is like the conductor of an orchestra,” said Mustafa Yildiz, 64, a civil servant and supporter strolling recently outside Ankara’s Kocatepe mosque. “The presidential system will create harmony in Turkish politics.”
Erdogan has bristled during mass rallies, assailing opposition movements as part of “the Armenian lobby, homosexuals … representatives of sedition.” He has repeatedly rejected allegations that Ottoman-era Turkey committed a genocide against the nation’s Armenian minority a century ago.
cComments
Orientals are different. An autocrat with quirks and bad manners is frequently perceived as the projection of one’s own strength, which actually doesn’t exist. More prosperity causes more secularization, which could allow Turkey to move from an oligarchy (CHP) via an autocracy (AKP)…
jgttgns
at 10:07 PM June 05, 2015
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Erdogan’s bellicose campaign rhetoric has outraged opposition leaders, who note that the constitution requires the president be nonpartisan and above party politics. Erdogan stepped down last year as party leader to run for president, receiving 52% of the vote. But he has hardly remained above the partisan fray.
“Erdogan is not a president who could stay passive,” noted Huseyin Bagci, head of International Relations at Middle East Technical University in Ankara. “The problem for him is the constitution is not ‘his’ constitution.”
Intimidation of critical journalists, now commonplace under Erdogan, has increased.
Most recently, Erdogan demanded a life sentence for the editor of the daily newspaper Cumhuriyet, Can Dundar, for publishing images of a shipment of heavy weapons to Syrian Islamist rebels on trucks belonging to the Erdogan-controlled National Intelligence Organization, or MiT, in January 2014. The weapons were hidden below medical supplies, the newspaper reported.
Erdogan’s foreign policy, particularly support for Syrian rebels, is deeply unpopular among many Turks. Turkey’s more-than-500-mile border with Syria has functioned as a rebel resupply and logistics zone.
In this election, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, an Erdogan loyalist, was supposed to be the public face of the ruling party. Posters of the bespectacled Davutoglu are everywhere. But he lacks Erdogan’s charisma, so the president has hit the campaign trail with gusto, counting on his cult of personality to bring in votes.
The two men regularly attend “opening ceremonies” together, where they appeal to the grandiose ambitions of their conservative Sunni Muslim support base.
“By God’s will, Jerusalem belongs to the Kurds, the Turks, the Arabs and to all Muslims,” Davutolgu reportedly said during the recent inauguration of a new airport in southeastern Turkey.
But Erdogan’s march toward a more powerful presidency could be thwarted if the HDP manages to capture more than 10% of the vote, the threshold needed to enter the parliament. That would give the group a substantial bloc.
The left-wing party, founded in 2012, has run an upbeat campaign. Half of the HDP’s candidates are women, and religious figures and gay candidates are also in the ballots.
“I like their speeches, that they don’t discriminate against anyone,” said 40-year-old Emine Tunc, sitting in a billiard hall in the predominantly Kurdish Istanbul neighborhood of Tarlabasi, speaking of the HDP. The ruling party “will help the Syrians, but when it comes to us, they do nothing.”
The HDP strategy is a gamble, however. If the Kurdish-linked bloc’s vote drops below that watershed mark, the Justice and Development Party probably will absorb most of those votes and move closer to securing the large majority it needs to push through constitutional changes.
Erdogan has pursued a peace bid with the country’s Kurds, strengthening Kurdish rights after decades of insurgency that cost of tens of thousands of lives.
However, as Islamic State militants last year laid siege to the ethnic Kurdish city of Kobani, Erdogan refused to support the defenders of the Syrian border city. The policy alienated the nation’s Kurdish minority and sparked riots.
Appealing to more religiously austere Kurdish voters, Erdogan brandishes Kurdish-language Korans at rallies in an attempt to arrest resurgent Kurdish nationalism.
“I hope my conservative Kurdish brothers can realize Erdogan is just using religion as a tool to get more power,” said Sedat Ocal, a 29-year-old Kurdish man who hawks cheap jeans from a shop in Eminonu, a suburb on the fringes of Istanbul’s iconic Bosporus Strait.
Yet to his supporters, Erdogan can do little wrong.
Standing in his spice store in Istanbul’s conservative Fatih district’s Egyptian market — a ruling party stronghold — Savas Cinar, his beard fashioned in the style favored by Erdogan’s pious supporters, rattles off a list of the party’s achievements, including giant construction projects and the rescinding of a government ban on women wearing Muslim head scarves at universities and government offices.
“Before Erdogan, we Muslims had no life,” Cinar said. “Soldiers used to come to our Koran recitals and harass us. Now we are a global power.”
Special correspondent Johnson reported from Istanbul and Times staff writer McDonnell from Beirut.
Turkey Europe Elections Recep Tayyip Erdogan Twitter, Inc. European Union London School of Economics
Stunning election loss in Turkey is a slap in the face from voters for once-revered Erdogan
After an election setback, Turkey’s ruling party is seeking a coalition government — with little success
It’s difficult to pinpoint just when the leader once nicknamed “The Sultan” became a figure more akin to the emperor who had no clothes.
For more than a dozen years, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s gilded career had taken him from one electoral triumph to the next, heaping spoils and glory not only on the Islamist-rooted political party he co-founded but on the 61-year-old leader himself.
All that changed Sunday, when voters delivered the electoral equivalent of a stinging slap in the face to the man once considered the most popular politician in the country’s modern history.
The voting results deprived Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP, of the single-party power it had enjoyed since 2002, and derailed his personal vision of transforming the largely ceremonial post of president, which he assumed in August, into an overarching seat of power.
The ballot-box verdict could be read as an affirmation of what had long been buzzed about in Turkey’s ancient bazaars and spanking-new skyscrapers: that Ergodan, once seen as a savior, was in danger of becoming a national liability.
Wearied by years of harsh crackdowns and grandiose gestures on Erdogan’s part, many Turks came to view him as a leader who burned bridges rather than building them. The aura of fear and reverence dissolved into something unfamiliar and far more subversive: laughter.
It wasn’t always like that. Erdogan came of political age as an outsider who mounted courageous challenges to Turkey’s often-sinister military-dominated power elite. Jailed for reciting a poem, he dabbled in prison verse. In his early years in power, with his star on the rise, he was a darling of the West, hailed as the moderate face of political Islam.
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He empowered an entrepreneurial class of pious Muslims who became an engine of Turkey’s eye-catching economic growth. In a diverse and complex society struggling to find a foothold in the modern world, Erdogan preached inclusiveness and backed up his words with actions.
As prime minister, he risked considerable political capital to reach out to the minority Kurds and worked to halt a bloody civil conflict of decades’ standing. For a time, he worked assiduously to forge friendly relations with neighbors — even with Israel, reviled throughout the Muslim world.
On the misty shores of the Bosporus, Turks on Monday offered differing day-after assessments of when and how it went wrong for Erdogan. Some traced the trajectory to the violent crackdown on demonstrations that sprang up in 2013 in Istanbul’s Gezi Park — initially a relatively narrow green-minded protest movement that turned into a broader expression of popular discontent.
“The Gezi movement was important, beginning a discourse of change,” said Esra Ozyurek, a scholar of contemporary Turkey at the London School of Economics. As arrests and beatings mounted, Erdogan, who had entered politics as a champion of the oppressed, began to be seen as an oppressor.
Hard on the heels of the Gezi protests came a corruption scandal that spurred Erdogan, then still prime minister, to purge hundreds of supporters of a rival movement led by a onetime ally, exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen, from the police, judiciary and media.
At the same time, it escaped the notice of few that Erdogan appeared bent on supplanting the secular-democratic legacy of Turkey’s founding leader, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Seeking to symbolically undo one of Ataturk’s signature feats, a rendering of Turkish in the Western alphabet, Erdogan last year vowed to impose compulsory lessons in Arabic-alphabet Ottoman script.
cComments
Regardless, yesterday was a great win for Kemalism and the secular nature of Turkey’s government. It should be celebrated, not feared and there is the possibility albeit remote at this point that the three opposition parties could form their own coalition if Erdogen doesn’t get back…
affableman
at 9:07 AM June 08, 2015
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Bellicose and retrograde statements became the new norm. A women’s job, Erdogan told a female audience, is motherhood. Twitter, he declared, was “evil.” To the European Union, when it urged greater media freedom, he replied: “Mind your own business.” For the New York Times, which recently wrote a sharply worded editorial about Turkey losing its way, he offered this riposte: “Know your place.”
Virulent attacks on journalists and social media became routine as the list of matters over which the president was ridiculed grew longer. There was the opulent 1,150-room presidential palace — complete with Ottoman-era touches such as a team of food testers to guard against poisoning — whose $615-million cost Erdogan justified just before the election by saying that his previous residence had suffered from an infestation of cockroaches.
There was the movie-set presidential guard, done up in Turkic warrior costumes from centuries past, and the teenage boy dragged from his classroom to account for a Facebook post. A politician once known for skillful, even spellbinding rhetoric fell back on conspiratorial rants, with the final days of the campaign consumed by his dark mutterings about the seditious tendencies of Armenians and homosexuals.
Such rhetoric went down well with the president’s conservative base. But the unhappy state of Turkey’s affairs of state was memorably encapsulated last month by author Stephen Kinzer, a long-respected observer of the country.
“Once seen as a skilled modernizer, he now sits in a 1,000-room palace denouncing the European Union, decreeing the arrest of journalists, and ranting against short skirts and birth control,” Kinzer wrote of Erdogan in a column in the Boston Globe. Retribution was swift: The author said a high civic honor that was to be bestowed on him by a Turkish city was swiftly rescinded.
Erdogan, who was ubiquitous during the campaign — in defiance of a constitutional role that is supposed to keep the president aloof from politics — remained silent for a full 18 hours after it first became clear that the AKP’s hopes for a parliamentary majority had gone unrealized. Even then, his first public response was in the form of a written statement, not a personal appearance.
The election results, he said, “do not give the opportunity to any party to form a single-party government” — implicitly inviting the AKP’s rivals to consider forming a coalition.
So far, none has expressed an interest in partnering with the AKP. If a new government cannot be assembled within 45 days, Turkey will likely go to new elections. Shock waves from Sunday’s election results, meanwhile, rattled Turkey’s financial markets Monday, with the stock market sliding and the lira touching new lows.
The party’s titular head, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, reminded the public that the AKP was still the largest bloc in parliament, after winning about 41% of the vote. “It is the winner; it finished first in these elections,” he said.
Some analysts pointed out that it is easy to forget that Erdogan skillfully harnessed powerful political impulses that remain widely felt in Turkey — and could do so again.
“He is still president for the next four years, and he has considerable authorities, and has by all accounts exploited every one of them,” said Francis J. Ricciardone, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey who is now vice president and director of the Atlantic Council think tank. “He is clearly going to be influential.”
In April, Germany recognized the Armenian genocide. Germany, as the former colonial ruler of Namibia, has however not yet recognized the murder of tens of thousands of Namibians as a genocide. Many say the time is ripe.
On June 2, a group of German parliamentarians, led by Dagmar Freitag of the Social Democrats (SPD), will visit Namibia to meet MPs, civil society representatives and Namibian academics. For Israel Kaunatijke, a Herero living in Berlin, this is a chance to revive the discussion over the Namibian genocide. Germany, he says, should finally recognize that the slaughter of the Herero, Nama, Damara and San peoples of Namibia was in fact a genocide.
Israel Kaunatjike started the initiative ‘No amnesty for genocide’ in Germany.
The calls for an official recognition of a genocide has grown even stronger after the German parliament or Bundestag recognized the Armenian genocide in April this year. “They don’t take our issues seriously, that is discriminating and disrespectful,” Kaunatijke told DW. For years, his initiative “No amnesty on genocide” has been lobbying for the recognition of the crime against his ancestors.
A brutal past
According to the UN, German troops committed the first genocide of the 20th century in Namibia which was then known as German South-West Africa. In 1904, the German general Lothar vonThrotha used an uprising against the colonialists as pretext to slaughter around 70,000 Hereros, which amounted to about 80 percent of its population. The troops also wiped out half of the people of the Nama ethnic group. The UN officially called the killings a genocide as early as 1948. But Germany refuses to do so to this day.
In 2004, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, Germany’s development minister at the time, took first steps to acknowledge Germany’s brutal role in Namibia. She attended a remembrance service in Namibia’s Waterberg and asked for forgiveness through a joint prayer. An official German apology was however not part of the package.
Herero women prepare to receive the bones that were kept in German museums for ‘research’ purposes.
Debates in German parliament
The German Bundestag has seen several attempts to demand such an apology, Wieczorek-Zeul told DW. In 2012, the Social Democrats party (SPD) and Green party tabled a proposal to officially recognize the genocide.
In response to this, the German government stated that the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of December 1948 could not be used retrospectively. Germany, the government argued, had moreover repeatedly admitted its part in the Namibian killings, offered continued cooperation and support to the Namibian government and was doing enough to compensate the victims. According to Kaunatijke, this however was not an admission of guilt, nor was it the deserved apology.
With the recent discussion over the Armenian genocide, the timing for a renewed debate could not be better, says ex-minister Wieczorek-Zeul . “You cannot just always ask others to recognize their guilt. You also have to admit your own guilt and give things their proper name,” she said.
“There is finally a real movement” which could lead to a renewed proposal in parliament, says Kaunatijke. On May 7, Germany’s first member of parliament of African origin, Karamba Diaby (SPD), called for a proper reflection on this chapter in history and for its place in German school and history books.
‘Apology now’ read the posters during a protest during the repatriation ceremony at Berlin’s Charite.
Lost homelands and stolen remains
Besides recognition, compensation should also be up for discussion, says Kaunatijke. Wieczorek-Zeul agrees. Germany’s reparation payments to the Namibian government are not specific enough, she says. “The people in the affected regions must be reached and their standard of living must be improved,” she argues. Today, many descendants of those murdered and displaced live in what is today Botswana, South Africa and Angola, Kaunatijke explains. They should be able to return to their homelands and receive compensation for losing their land.
According to Kaunatijke, Germany also ignores the fact that it carried out ‘racial research’ on the Herero. At the time, the ‘German Reich’, as it was then known, shipped the remains of deceased or murdered Herero to Germany for anatomical research. Around 3,000 bones are still stacked away in the archives of German museums today.
Germany repatriated several bones and skulls back to Nambia in 2011. According to Wieczorek-Zeul, this was however conducted in an entirely ignorant and insensitive manner by the German government. The event which took place at Berlin’s Charite hospital, was attended by Cornelia Pieper, the former Minister of State of Germany’s foreign office. Pieper, who also failed to voice a proper apology, was booed by the audience. In a second handing-over of remains in 2014 the ceremony was consequently confined to a much smaller audience.
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The US investigation into football corruption could pose a “real threat” to Sepp Blatter, a former legal chief tells Sky News.
The former Director of Public Prosecutions has told Sky News he expects Sepp Blatter will be questioned as part of the US investigation into corruption – possibly under arrest.
Mr Blatter won a fifth term as FIFA president on Friday despite widespread calls for him to resign after seven officials were arrested last week in Zurich on a US warrant.
The arrests were connected to a bribery scandal being investigated by American, Swiss and other law enforcement agencies.
Lord Macdonald told Sky’s Murnaghan programme: “I think the real threat to Mr Blatter doesn’t come from the Swiss, it comes from the US, their anti-racketeering legislation and co-operating accomplices.
“Jack Warner, the FIFA man who has been arrested in Trinidad, has already said to the press ‘if I’m going down, why isn’t he being arrested as well?’ referring to Mr Blatter.
“I think the risk to Mr Blatter is this developing investigation in Washington. I think the Americans will want to talk to Mr Blatter and they may do it under arrest.”
It comes as Labour urged David Cameron to hold an emergency summit over FIFA corruption claims to ensure Britain does not “idly stand by”.
Shadow culture secretary Chris Bryant wants politicians, the English Football Association, British sponsors and broadcasters to establish a “common position” and give “serious consideration” to withdrawing from all future FIFA competitions.
In the letter to the Prime Minister, Mr Bryant said Britain “cannot just be commentators or spectators” amid calls to boycott the World Cup after Mr Blatter was re-elected as leader despite the arrests.
A total of 14 people connected to football – including the seven FIFA officials arrested in Zurich – have been indicted on corruption charges by the US.
Mr Blatter is not named in the US indictment and denies any personal involvement in alleged acts of bribery.
During a news conference in Switzerland on Saturday, he was asked by Sky News if he authorised a $10m bribe to the disgraced official Jack Warner.
“Definitely that’s not me. I have no $10m,” Mr Blatter replied.
The allegation is contained in the US indictment which states, “a high-ranking FIFA official caused payments… totalling 10 million – to be wired from a FIFA account in Switzerland to a Bank of America correspondent account in New York … controlled by Jack Warner”.
When Mr Blatter was asked if he was worried about being arrested in the corruption investigation, he responded curtly: “Arrested for what? Next question.” Meanwhile, Barclays has launched an internal review into whether it was used for illegal payments by FIFA officials, a source told AFP news agency.
Meanwhile, Barclays has launched an internal review into whether it was used for illegal payments by FIFA officials, a source told AFP news agency.
It was one of the three banks with British headquarters named in the US indictment.
Another, Standard Chartered, said on Friday: “We are aware that two payments cleared by Standard Chartered are mentioned in the indictment. We are looking into those payments.”
The third named bank, HSBC, has so far declined to comment.
It comes after Prince William urged FIFA to reform and show “it can represent the interests of fair play”.
The Duke of Cambridge, who is president of the Football Association, has asked sponsors to press for changes at FIFA.
FA chairman Greg Dyke has said Britain will not be able to make a stand against FIFA without wider support.
“Putting pressure on Sepp Blatter is pretty impossible,” he told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show.
“But putting pressure on other footballing nations and putting pressure on sponsors is a good idea, I think.”
Election Results Could Hinder Turkey’s Erdogan
Erdoğan Threatens Journalist Over Arms Report
Israel Kaunatjike started the initiative ‘No amnesty for genocide’ in Germany.
Herero women prepare to receive the bones that were kept in German museums for ‘research’ purposes.
‘Apology now’ read the posters during a protest during the repatriation ceremony at Berlin’s Charite.
