by Our Foreign Desk

TURKEY’S ruling party chose presidential crony Binali Yildirim as its chairman and next prime minister yesterday.

Current Transport and Communications Minister Mr Yildirim, running unopposed, won the votes of 1,405 out of 1,470 delegates to the Justice and Development Party (AKP) extraordinary congress.

The AKP founding member is now set to replace Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who announced earlier this month that he is stepping down amid differences with power-hungry President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

In his speech before the vote, Mr Yildirim vowed to introduce a new constitution, changing Turkey’s political system into a presidential system, legitimising the current de facto situation.

Mr Yildirim inherits a raft of problems from his predecessor including the renewed Kurdistan Workers’ Party insurgency triggered by the government’s support for terrorist forces in Syria, allegedly including Islamic State.

Authorities lifted a longstanding curfew from parts of the Sur district of the mainly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir yesterday. Hundreds of civilians have been killed in the security forces’ crackdown in the country’s south-east.

In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung yesterday ahead of a visit to Turkey, German Chancellor Angela Merkel raised concerns about the counterinsurgency.

The Turkish parliament voted last week to strip 138 pro-Kurdish HDP and Kemalist CHP MPs of their immunity from prosecution — part of a wider crackdown on dissent.

And on Friday 85 miners in the Black Sea province of Zonguldak began a sit-in and hunger strike after they and 160 colleagues had not been paid since January.