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A commemorative event for the 104th birthday of the extreme right wing Nationalist Movement Party’s (MHP) founder Alparslan Türkeş has been stormed by a rival group in Turkey’s capital Ankara on Sunday.
A day after the chair of the party’s Ankara branch said on Twitter that ‘a commemoration by people who betrayed Türkeş is totally unacceptable’, a group of 50 people came storming in during the event and started pushing around people on the front rows.
It has been noted by a speaker at the event that the attack was staged ‘in coordination with the police’.
Followers of the Nationalist Movement Party had split after Meral Akşener, a once prominent figure in the party, had formed a break away Iyi Party in 2017 and took her own path, adopting a hostile stance against the government unlike MHP chair Devlet Bahçeli who chose to form an alliance with the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
As recent polls indicate a rise in the support for Akşener, support for Bahçeli seems to be on a steady decline, which makes relations between former comrades more bitter than ever.
Both parties try to appeal to their roots, especially with the memory of Alparslan Türkes, a historical figure who had introduced racist ultra nationalism into Turkish politics in early 1960s.
Türkeş, a former military officer, had set up ‘commando camps’ in late 1960s which provided paramilitary training for militants, also known as ‘grey wolves’, who assassinated thousands of people throughout the 1970s in anti-communist campaigns. The campaigns and assassinations had always been overlooked and legitimised by the centre-right party leader Süleyman Demirel who’d served as prime minister at the time.
