Turkish officials target November for new elections

Turkey's election commission has proposed that any snap parliamentary election should be held on Nov. 1, officials of the ruling AK Party said on Thursday, reinforcing the sense that a re-vote is inevitable after June's poll yielded no working majority.

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu formally gave up its attempt to find a junior coalition partner on Tuesday, more than two months after the AKP lost its overall majority for the first time since coming to power in 2002.

If, as now seems likely, no one else can form a coalition by Sunday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is likely to call a new election, as he indicated on Wednesday.

AKP officials said the High Election Board had proposed Nov. 1 as the date. But even that failed to assuage market worries about the $870 billion economy.

The lira currency, already at record lows on a combination of political uncertainty and rising militant violence, fell more than 1.5 percent, briefly weakening beyond the psychological barrier of 3 to the dollar for the first time.

Erdogan, founder of the AKP, could still in theory ask the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) to try to form a government.

However, the CHP has shown little sign of being able to assemble a majority, and local media quoted Erdogan as telling a meeting of village administrators that he would not "waste time" with those who did not know the address of the presidential palace, an apparent reference to the head of the CHP.

Instead, Erdogan has indicated that he will summon an interim "election cabinet" to lead Turkey to a new election.

This would see power temporarily shared between four political parties with deep ideological divides, although even that prospect is uncertain as two of those parties, the secularist CHP and the nationalist MHP, have said they would not take part.

The political crisis has coincided with rising political violence, some of it linked to Turkey's growing involvement in the civil war in neighboring Syria.

On Wednesday, gunmen fired on police outside a palace in Istanbul and a bomb killed eight soldiers in the mostly Kurdish southeast.

Al Jazeera and Reuters