Turkey ex-PM Yildirim elected parliament speaker

ANKARA: Turkey’s new parliament on Thursday elected as speaker former prime minister Binali Yildirim, a loyalist of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan whose post was abolished after elections last month. The 600-member parliament approved Yildirim, 62, of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) as the new speaker with 335 votes in the third round of voting. Erdogan’s AKP is just short of a majority in the parliament, but counts on backing from its ally, the hard-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), whose votes helped agree Yildirim as speaker. Yildirim went down in Turkey’s modern history on Monday as the last of its 27 prime ministers, as the country switched from a parliamentary to a presidential system with Erdogan’s outright victory in the June 24 elections. A former transport minister who oversaw the implementation of major construction projects, Yildirim is a close ally of Erdogan, who made him prime minister in 2016.

from The News International - World https://ift.tt/2zBbO6N