Turkish President Erdogan’s expensive new palace

This video from Turkey says about itself:

29 October 2014

The Turkish president has unveiled his new presidential palace on Wednesday amidst huge controversy.

Opposition politicians have mocked the extravagance of the palace – which has 1,000 rooms and is understood to have cost more than 270 million euros – and say it is evidence of the president’s autocratic tendencies.

Environmentalists are angry that the complex has been built on one of the city’s best preserved green spaces and that hundreds of trees were cut down.

This blog reported that the king of Saudi Arabia ordered to build an expensive new royal palace in Mecca, destroying ancient buildings, important in the history of Islam, for that.

President Erdogan of Turkey is doing something similar, according to the Morning Star daily in Britain, 30 November 2014:

TURKEY: Riot police dispersed a protest by dozens of students near Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan‘s new 1,000-room palace on Saturday.

Police used shields and pepper spray to prevent the students from marching to the huge and extravagant palace.

The £400 million monstrosity has drawn the ire of opposition parties, environmentalists and human rights
activists.

Euronews writes:

It was built on land donated to the state in 1937 and the area [was] declared a protected site in 1992. Constructing a building on the site is and remains illegal.

An administrative court demanded that construction stop. This was backed up by the Council of State. In fact there were reportedly three injunctions from three different administrative courts to stop the building of the palace.

Erdogan’s meals tested for poison amid security fears: here.

President Erdogan, who is supposed to be above politics, is up to his eyeballs in a campaign to win constitutional changes that give him unprecedented power: here.