The Justice and Development Party (AKP) has had a convincing win in the 1st November snap election and has secured a clear majority in the Turkish parliament.
The national assembly will still consist of four parties, but the AKP has seen a steep rise in its share of seats, increasing the likelihood of it making a constitutional amendment to pave the way for a change to a presidential system, fulfilling the ambitions of its founding leader, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
According to the results, with most of the ballots counted, the AKP secured around 49.4% of the vote, giving it 315 seats in the 550-member parliament, For a constitutional change at parliament in favour of the presidential system in line with Erdoğan’s aspirations, the AKP needed to win 367 seats, though 330 seats would be enough to take the issue to a referendum.
The results for the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) were considerably disappointing, as it only managed to slightly improve on its 7th June performance, getting around 25.8%.
Both the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and the Kurdish problem-focused Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) lost a considerable number of votes. The HDP, which got 13.2% of the votes in June, again managed to cross the 10% election threshold to get representation in parliament, but only by a narrow margin.
The MHP’s loss was even sharper, dropping to around 12% from 16% in June, apparently losing a sizeable chunk of support to the AKP.
Most people were surprised by the outcome of the election, as it was anticipated that the result would see the formation of a coalition government, but enough voters discounted widespread concerns over democracy and freedom in Turkey in favour of stability to bring the AKP back to single-party government.
Hurriyet
The post AKP wins Turkey’s snap election appeared first on North Cyprus News | Online News for North Cyprus | LGC News.