Turkey opposition nominates veteran ex-leader for speaker

Turkey's main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) on Wednesday nominated its veteran former leader Deniz Baykal for the post of parliament speaker after elections in which the ruling party failed to win an overall majority.

The election of the speaker next week will be a major moment in the seismic changes in Turkish politics following the June 7 elections which led the way for a coalition government for the first time since the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002.

A meeting of the CHP's executive board, chaired by its leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, said Baykal would be its candidate to chair the parliament.

"To be speaker for parliament political experience is needed. We decided that the most appropriate name for this task is Deniz Baykal," said Kilicdaroglu, quoted by NTV television.

Baykal was CHP leader until 2010 when he was sunk by a sex tape scandal that was gleefully exploited by his political foes including then premier and now President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

However the CHP grandee, 76, is a respected figure and chaired the first session of the new parliament on Tuesday as the oldest MP in the chamber.

The AKP have 258 seats in the 550-seat parliament, CHP 132, and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party (HDP) 80 apiece.

The HDP has already nominated Dengir Mir Mehmet Firat, a former senior member of the AKP who moved to its ranks.

Meanwhile, the MHP Wednesday nominated Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the former head of the Organisation for Islamic Cooperation (OIC) who unsuccessfully challenged Erdogan in August 2014 presidential elections, as its candidate.

The AKP has yet to announce its candidate for speaker.

The election for speaker is due to take place in parliament on June 30, with additional rounds on July 1 if needed.

It will be closely watched for signs of compromises between the parties as they seek to form a coalition.

By far the most likely coalition option has been seen as between the AKP and the nationalist MHP, which both share a core voter base of conservatives in the centre of the country.

Speaker candidates may attract cross-party support and the vote will be an important bellweather for the most likely coalition combination.

Were the AKP to help Baykal win the speaker's chair it would be seen as drastically increasing the chance of an AKP-CHP grand coalition.

Baykal held talks with his former foe Erdogan in the days after the election, in an encounter that attracted huge attention in Turkey.

Erdogan may also not have forgotten that it was under Baykal's tenure that the CHP backed legal reforms that allowed him to become premier in 2003, despite his previous jail conviction for reciting an Islamist poem.