Turkish Election Results

Voters in Turkey have returned the ruling AK Party to government after today’s election handing them 341 seats in the new Parliament. Their chief rivals, the republican CHP with 112 seats and the right-wing nationalist MHP with 70 seat were left far behind. However, the victory is not without dissapointment. The ruling party remains 27 votes shy from the goal of 367 seats set by their leader as the goal for the summer election. The magic number of 367 was needed to allow the AKP to select the new President of the Republic, and to overcome the Constitional Court's clever blocking of their preferred candidate. This will set up another stand-off between the populist AKP and the holders of Ataturk’s republican revolution (i.e. the military and the Constitutional Court). The wild card in this stand-off will be the newly elected “Independents,” who with 26 seats, will act as potential kingmakers in the debate over the presidential selection. When you consider that 22 of those seats are held by the pro-Kurdish DTP, who ran as “Independents” to get around the 10% national threshold, then the upcoming battles over control of the selection of the President gets even more tumultuous (pending final results). After all, the mere presence of these DTP deputies is enough to send many hard-line Turkish nationalists call for the resumption of non-democratic measures.

However, the AKP and the DTP may need each other to fend off the right-wing nationalists and the republicans. In this case, can an AKP-DTP agrement form the basis for an agreement over the selection of the president? This will remain an open question depending on the AKP’s ability to continue its courting of the EU while also making concessions to Kurdish minority rights. Such a concialtory move would endear them both to the kingmaker “Independents” in Turkey and to the human rights activists in Europe who might hold sway over Turkey’s entry to the EU. It could be a gamble that perhaps only a party such as the AKP, which cleverly balances so many interests, can pull off. Then again the backlash in nationalist heartland of Turkey and xenophobic heartland of Europe might prove to be too much for such a bold strategy to work. In this case, all parties might resort to the cheapest form of exclusionary nationalism, in which case danger for more violence Southeast Turkey becomes an grotesque possibility.

Considered geographically, the AKP victory is quite impressive winning the largest share of the vote in most districts. The AKP received more than 60 percent of the vote in 10 central Anatolian and southeastern Anatolian cities, evidence of the strong support in the Turkish heartland. Conversely the CHP was confined to its bases in western Turkey, and was shut out of from a number of cities failing to win a deputy in 35 out of 81 cities. Even in the stronghold of Izmir they were challenged by the AKP who almost doubled their votes to over 30%, only 5% less than the CHP’s 35% total. Although the DTP gathered the most votes in many Southeaster districts, the AKP also increased their share of votes in many of those distircts, in effect taking votes from the DTP. Although it did not win as many seats as it expected, overall, the AKP was the clearly the favoured party, and this election could signal the emergence as the new natural governing party. It’s ability to coalesce various core groups could prove disastrous for the AKP’s republican foes, making the coming weeks worth following.