Turkey announces general election results
Turkish authorities today announced the final results of the country’s general elections, confirming the ruling party’s victory.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP took 341 of the 550 seats, down from 351 in the outgoing Parliament, electoral board director Muammer Aydin said.
Aydin also confirmed that the AKP got 46.6 percent of the votes, almost 12 percentage points more than in the previous elections.
The main opposition Republican People’s Party won 112 seats. The far right Nationalist Action Party returned to the Parliament with 70 seats, after a five-year absence, Aydin said.
Nationalist Action would have been represented by 71 legislators, but one of its newly elected MPs was killed in a car crash last Thursday and his seat will remain empty.
Results confirmed that 26 independents, including 22 pro-Kurdish lawmakers, won seats.
The pro-Kurdish lawmakers ran in the election as independents to circumvent a 10% vote threshold required to win representation in Parliament. They regrouped yesterday under the banner of pro-Kurdish the Democratic Society Party, which seeks more rights for the ethnic minority.
Officials from the party have petitioned to have the party registered in the Parliament.
The Parliament was scheduled to be sworn in on Saturday. Once the new government is formed, Parliament must choose a new president
The Nationalist Action party has already pledged to help the government achieve the quorum needed to elect a president. In May, Parliament failed to reach a quorum in a similar vote.
Erdogan had nominated Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, one of his closest allies, for the presidency in April, sparking a backlash from the firmly secular opposition.
Both Erdogan and Gul’s past in political Islam raised fears among many Turks that the government was trying to scrap Turkey’s secular principles.
The main opposition party’s boycott of the first round of the vote meant that a quorum could not be reached – and prompted Erdogan to call general elections July 22, four months earlier than scheduled, in an attempt to resolve the impasse.
After the elections, both Gul and party officials signalled his name would be put forward again.
