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In a repudiation of the ruling party of Turkey and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, voters a week ago Sunday flocked to the polls to deny the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, or AKP) a majority of seats in the country's parliament, the Grand National Assembly. Erdoğan had hoped the AKP would win a super-majority (330 of the chamber's 550 seats) in order to change Turkey's constitution and give significantly more power to the largely ceremonial presidency. Erdoğan, who has lurched increasingly toward authoritarianism, had intended to build a powerful Turkish presidential system more akin to Russia's.
However, his party received only 258 seats, 18 seats shorts of even a simple majority, throwing Turkish politics into real upheaval for first time since the AKP came to power in 2002. The center-left Republican People's Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, or CHP) won 132 seats. The far-right Nationalist Movement Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, or MHP) won 80 seats, and, on the left, the newly minted Peoples' Democratic Party (Halkların Demokratik Partisi, or HDP) also won 80 seats. Follow below the fold to find out how the AKP lost its majority and where Turkish politics might be headed next.
The AKP has held power in the country since winning two-thirds of the seats in parliament despite taking just 34 percent of the nationwide vote in 2002. That bizarre result came thanks to the very steep barrier Turkey sets for parties to enter the Assembly: In order to take any seats at all, a party must win at least 10 percent of the vote overall, the highest such threshold in the world. Any votes for a party taking less than that amount are simply not counted. As a result, 2002's fractured election, which resulted in five parties receiving between 5 and 10 percent, meant that only the two largest—AKP and center-left CHP—actually managed to enter parliament.
The AKP won subsequent elections in 2007 and 2011 with nearly 50 percent of the vote and comfortable majorities, thanks again in part to the 10 percent cutoff. That threshold was originally enacted by military leaders in order to keep parties backed by the country's Kurdish ethnic minority out of parliament. Kurdish parties, however, exploited a loophole in 2007 and 2011, running candidates as independents, as the 10 percent bar doesn't apply to such candidacies.
However, this year, the new HDP was able to clear the 10 percent hurdle and won 80 seats with a platform of support for minority rights (particularly Kurdish ones), as well as more broadly egalitarian and left-wing policies that appealed to urban elites in Istanbul and other big cities who were dissatisfied with the country's economy. HDP's base was quite clearly in the Kurdish areas of the East, but they could not have made it over the 10 percent bar without support across the country. HDP's success meant that the number of seats the ruling AKP received was much more in line with its share of the vote, instead of the inflated totals it had grown accustomed to winning.
The HDP wasn't the only party able to gain seats at AKP's expense. Across Turkey's conservative, rural middle, the ultra-nationalist, far-right MHP gained both seats and votes in areas the AKP has dominated since coming to power. Although the MHP is more secular than the Islamist-oriented AKP, it is more politically conservative, particularly in dealing with the Kurds, where the AKP has been trying to advance a peace process.
The center-left CHP maintained its status as the second-largest party with little change in its vote or seat percentages. The party likely picked up some centrist AKP voters while losing a similar number leftist voters to the HDP. Before the election, there was much discussion in left-wing circles about tactically voting for the HDP to ensure that they passed the 10 percent threshold, which likely held CHP's vote down a bit.
While voters resoundingly rejected the AKP and Erdoğan's plan for an imperial presidency are dead, the future is uncertain, as a coalition government must now be formed. The AKP, as the largest party, has the first chance to establish the next government; if no government is formed 45 days after the new parliament sits (about two weeks from now), a new election will be held.
We know that the HDP will not join with AKP, and the MHP will not join with HDP. The two most likely options that have been discussed are an AKP/MHP nationalist coalition or a CHP/MHP anti-Erdoğan coalition (one like it existed in the 90s), with the HDP providing the necessary votes from outside the coalition. Recent days have also brought rumors of an AKP/CHP grand coalition, but it seems like CHP would risk being totally overtaken by HDP on the left if it got into bed with the AKP. (For more insight, check out this Washington Post piece by two Turkish experts looking at coalition possibilities in depth.)
For now, Turkey has rejected authoritarianism and instead faces a measure of political uncertainty. But in a democracy, those are exactly the sort of tradeoffs you make—and when a guy like Erdoğan is on the other side of that trade, it's one you make gladly.
Special thanks to David Beard and Stephen Wolf for their substantial contributions to this piece.