Watch: Turkey’s Parliament Erupts into Another Fistfight

These days, Turkish parliamentarians are fighting their legislative battles with fists rather than words.

On Monday night, for the second time over the last week, debate about a proposal to strip pro-Kurdish lawmakers of their legal immunity dissolved into chaos. In a scene more befitting a mosh pit than a chamber of Parliament, legislators leaped over desks, slammed into one another, exchanged hard punches, and hurled water bottles. The scrap left one person with a dislocated shoulder and another with a bloody nose.

After the brawl, lawmakers from the People’s Democratic Party (HDP), which advocates for Kurdish and other minority rights, walked out of the committee room, effectively boycotting the proposed constitutional amendment. Their opponents in the ruling AK Party then passed it; a floor vote is expected to take place in mid-May.

Soon after the HDP made history last June as the first pro-Kurdish party to enter Parliament, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan began accusing it of following the bidding of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a secessionist group that has waged war against the state intermittently since the 1980s. Erdogan’s proposed amendment would pave the way for prosecuting members of the party as terrorist supporters.

The brawling in Parliament reflects to a lesser degree the violence that has roiled Turkey’s southeast since the collapse of a cease-fire with the PKK. Security operations there have led to the destruction of towns and the deaths of close to 400 military personnel and more than 5,000 Kurds.

One of the HDP’s co-leaders, Selahattin Demirtas, suggested that if the amendment is approved, and Erdogan succeeds in winnowing the party, he would consider setting up a parallel parliament.

“If our colleagues are arrested, their terms as legislators are ended, then all options are open for discussion,” Demirtas said Tuesday. “It’s not the parties that create parliaments, it’s the people, and if the people want it they can create more than one parliament.”

Turkey isn’t the only country to see a lapse in parliamentary decorum in recent months. On Saturday, Iraqi protesters fed up with Baghdad’s political elite mobbed one lawmaker’s motorcade and slapped around another as he attempted to flee the crowd; in Kosovo, parliamentarians have screeched into whistles, fired tear gas, and thrown water bottles to disrupt debates; and in Ukraine, fistfights have regularly interrupted legislative sessions since the Maidan revolution in early 2014.

Photo credit: STR/EPA