Turkey’s Ruling Party Loses Parliamentary Majority

I was frankly quite surprised by this result.

Quote:

Turkish voters delivered a rebuke on Sunday to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as his party lost its majority in Parliament in a historic election that dealt a blow to his ambition to rewrite Turkey’s Constitution and increase his power. The election results represented a significant setback to Mr. Erdogan, an Islamist who has steadily increased his power as president, a partly but not solely ceremonial post. After more than a decade as prime minister, Mr. Erdogan has pushed for more control of the judiciary and cracked down on any form of criticism, including prosecutions of those who insult him on social media, but his efforts appeared to have run aground on Sunday. The election was also a significant victory to the cadre of Kurds, liberals and secular Turks who found their voice of opposition to Mr. Erdogan during sweeping antigovernment protests two years ago.

http://ift.tt/1InWDs6

AKP's share of the vote fell from just under 50% in 2011 to 41% today. Its parliamentary representation declined from 327 to an estimated 258 of the 550 seats in the Turkish parliament.

The big winners appear to be the Kurds who had chosen an all-or-nothing strategy of fielding candidates across the country rather than just in the Kurdish regions of Turkey. That approach would have been for naught had they failed to reach the 10% threshold that allows a party to enter the legislature. (That 10% floor is the highest I know of in modern democracies. Germany has a controversial 5% rule, which was rationalized as needed to avoid the chaos of the Weimar Republic, but was also intended to keep out the Communists after World War II.)

Turkey’s Ruling Party Loses Parliamentary Majority