Commenting on the U.S. midterm elections, the Turkish daily Hurriyet said the results show that “Americans no longer want war.” The television channel A Haber stressed that President Donald Trump’s defeat is the result of his war against Iran and its effect on fuel prices in the United States.
“Change is taking place in the United States. The election results have turned the situation upside down, and politics in Washington has reached a standstill. The Democrats’ takeover of the Senate has limited the White House’s room for maneuver. The truth is that Americans no longer want war,” Hurriyet said Wednesday.
Coskun Basbug, a retired colonel in Turkish intelligence who wrote about the U.S. elections in the paper, said the main cause of Trump’s defeat is the economy. He pointed to a “clear gap between Trump’s campaign promises and his actual actions.”
“Trump’s unfulfilled promises to ‘end wars’ made the situation harder, and the key problems turned out to be the economy and the rise in oil prices resulting from the fighting. Americans do not want any war, because it brings them no benefits. So they started asking themselves: ‘Why are we fighting? Why are we supporting Israel and getting involved in this war?’ Since they found no answers to these questions, they voiced their opposition at the ballot box,” Basbug said.
The daily Daily Sabah said the Democrats’ victory is a “nationwide rebuke of President Donald Trump that will likely limit his ability to carry out his agenda during the last two years of his term.” “The results reflect deep outrage over the cost of living, tariffs and Trump’s war with Iran, which caused a sharp rise in fuel prices and deepened dissatisfaction with an already highly unpopular president,” the paper wrote.
A correspondent for the A Haber television channel said that “the only reason Republicans lost the elections to both the House of Representatives and the Senate is Donald Trump, and specifically his policy toward Iran, especially on fuel.”
Mehmet Beyhan, a commentator for the TGRT television channel, said on air Wednesday that “the election results should not be considered separately from U.S. relations with Israel, because Democrats achieved these results precisely thanks to criticism of those relations.”
“Israel brings American politicians no benefits. On the contrary, it is a source of losses for them,” the Turkish expert said. (PAP)
