Member of European Parliament: "Erdoğan ignores half of Turkey's population."

Member of European Parliament: "Erdoğan ignores half of Turkey's population." (TZ).

The European Parliament (EP) is not comfortable with the fact that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's harsh rhetoric against the opponents of his rule, which has deepened after victory in the recent local elections, has created a two-Turkey image in which half of its citizens are ignored by the government."

The problem is that we witness is a very clear authoritarian period in Turkish politics", said Maria Eleni Koppa, a member of the EP (MEP) and the vice-chair of the EP Delegation to the EU-Turkey Joint Parliamentary Committee, stressing that there is a narrative of two-Turkeys which is reinforced by Erdoğan's own rhetoric.

Koppa said that the other half of the population that did not vote for Erdoğan needs to be able to express itself in a democratic and open way.

Asked whether being a Muslim-majority country is a challenge for Turkey's EU membership bid, Koppa said that the EU is not a Christian club.

“Some people [in the EP] that Turkey has a different religion and different culture, so it does not belong in the EU, but what they do not see is that Islam is already in Europe.

We have learnt to live together and the EU is a multicultural society, so it's not a real problem. The real problem is whether Turkey's its political elites can share our values of democracy and human rights; this is the problem,” she added.Read the full story here.