Hürriyet Daily News publsiehd an article by Serkan Demirtaş headlined "Turkey’s most chaotic elections" devoted to the municipal elections held in Turkey on Sunday.
"More than 50 million Turks will cast their votes on Sunday, March 30, in the country’s most chaotic election ever, but unfortunately it will unlikely diffuse the political tension. We’ll all have the results of the election by Sunday night, but we’ll wake up to a much more polarized country where rival political groups will continue their fight, this time for the upcoming presidential elections," the article begins.
"Turkey will continue to discuss the corruption and graft claims after the elections, probably in a more tense way, as a parliamentary investigation committee will be established in April. The decision for opening such a commission was made on March 19, when a summary of proceedings about four former ministers was discussed at the General Assembly. According to Parliament’s internal regulations, the commission should be established before May 3, but the government will do its best to prevent the commission being turned into a court," the author writes.
"The fight between Erdoğan’s government and the “Hizmet movement” of U.S.-based Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, will likely intensify. The two sides will use all their means to hurt the other while there are speculations that the government will remove more pro-Gülen bureaucrats from their positions. More pressure on pro-Gülen media and businessmen are also seemingly in the pipeline," he believes.
"International concerns and reactions would complicate the situation for Turkey, especially from the European Union, which has already expressed its serious disturbance about restrictions on freedom of expression and the right to communicate. The post-election period is not going to be very pleasant for Turkey if it insists on such undemocratic bans," the article reads.
"The results of Sunday’s polls will tell us more about what one should expect with regard to the presidential elections in August. The election process will begin in June, only two months after local polls, but discussions about it will immediately begin March 31. A vote less than 42 percent for the ruling party will make it really hard for Erdoğan to win the presidency in popular elections, which require a 50 percent majority in the first leg," Demirtaş writes.
The Jerusalem Post published an article by Heib Keinon devoted to the Israeli-Iranian relations. "Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has a little “Hitlerite mustache” hiding under his beard, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman said Sunday, responding to Khamenei’s speech Sunday where he questioned whether the Holocaust took place," the article begins.
“Iran’s omnipotent leader and its supreme spiritual authority, Ali Khamenei, denied the existence of the Holocaust over the weekend,” Liberman wrote on his Facebook page. “Even after [president Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad left [the scene], and after [Iran’s current] charm offensive, a small Hitlerite mustache continues to lurk underneath the Ayatollah’s beard. This is another reminder for those who think there is a new Iran.”
Khameini used a Friday morning speech marking Norwuz, the Persian New Year, to call into question the Holocaust, the author of the article explains. “The Holocaust is an event whose reality is uncertain, and if it has happened, it’s uncertain how it has happened,” Khamenei’s Twitter account quoted him as saying in the speech, teh Jerusalem Post informs.
"His words also elicited a sharp response from the Prime Minister’s Office, with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s spokesman Mark Regev saying that “Khamenei denies the Holocaust even as he seeks the means to threaten the Jewish state with nuclear genocide,” the author of the article writes.
