See the F&V link at the end for a correction on the presidential election process.
Updated 23 July with final results via BBC.
According to AP, via the Guardian, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has won parliamentary elections today, with a much improved share of the vote compared to 2002. The AKP has won around 47% of the vote, compared to only 34.2% in 2002.
However, the AKP has actually lost seats, and will now have 340 (61.8%). In 2002, it won 363, which put it at 66% of the total and only four seats short of the two thirds needed to elect a president. (It was the failure of parliament to elect a president that triggered this election’s being called a few months early.)
Two secular parties collectively performed much better in 2007 than in 2002, combining for 183 seats, based on current estimates: Republican People’s Party (112 seats, compared to 178 in 2002) and the Nationalist Action Party (71, up from 0). Independents appear to have won 27.
Of course, the AKP’s seat decline despite large vote gain is entirely attributable to the better coordination of the secular parties and independent candidacies.* In 2002, only the AKP and the Republican People’s Party won any seats, aside from independents (of which there were only 9).
Turkey uses a districted list “PR” system with a 10% threshold. I put “PR” in quotation marks, because many of the districts are rather small and thus regional vote patterns can greatly distort the relationship of seats to national vote totals. More importantly, the threshold is applied nationally, such that even if a party is the largest party in a district, it will win no seats at all if it did not have 10% of the total aggregate national vote. (It is the only electoral system of its kind that I know of, and its design is of dubious democratic standards.)
Despite the setback in parliament, the more significant result of this election is that it reveals that the AKP was well served by the confrontations over attempting to elect a president and the struggles over Islamism (represented, in moderate form, by the AKP) and economic liberalism (also represented by the AKP) against its more secular but also nationalist opposition. And it suggests a likely affirmative answer to my question as to whether the party could win a national majority in a direct presidential election. The referendum on the constitutional amendments that would establish direct election was recently cleared by the Constitutional Court and is due in October.
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* See the two fascinating comments below by Bancki on coordination, a la SNTV systems, by the “independents” affiliated with the DTP (Kurdish party).
[Tom's very interesting comment has been moved to a different thread.--MSS]
Seed planted by Tom Round — 22 July 2007 @ 21:53
If Turkey allowed a party with 3% of the votes to win seats, and assuming that the Democratic Society Party had won 4% of the vote running under its own name rather than running independents, the results would have been something like:
AKP 273
CHP 121
MHP 81
DP 32
DSP 25
GP 18
Of course this ignores any independents other than DSP candidates.
It also ignores that fact that the Motherland Party would probably have run, rather than withdrawing when the merger with the Democrat Party (formerly True Path Party) failed.
But it shows the main point: with a 3% threshold, no manufactured majority for the AKP.
Note that your comment only two months ago that “The low threshold for independents makes me wonder why more candidates do not run as independents, clandestinely backed by locally strong parties that might not pass the threshold” was acted on by the DSP, which seems to have elected up to 27 MPs. Your assumption, that there are privileges in the electoral law for registered parties that discourage the practice, may have been premature.
Seed planted by Wilfred Day — 23 July 2007 @ 03:20
If a “party” like the Kurdish party DSP runs independent candidates in stead of a formal list, and it wants to win more than one seat in a constituency, its faced with the SNTV strategy problems (how many candidates should that party field and how can that party have its voters distribute their votes over those candidates) while other parties do not have to face them.
An example from the constituency of DÄ°YARBAKIR, 10 seats :
AKP party list 189,707 votes = 6 seats
independent candidate BÄ°RDAL 53,240 votes = 1 seat
independent candidate KIÅžANAK 51,694 votes = 1 seat
independent candidate DEMÄ°RTAÅž 50,611 votes = 1 seat
independent candidate TUÄžLUK 44,118 votes = 1 seat
(all other party lists less than 25,000 votes, all other independent candidates less than 7,000 votes)
When the four mentioned ‘independent’ candidates formed a DSP party list that was allowed to compete the seat distribution (= disregarding the national 10% barrier), it could have had 199,663 votes and would secure 5 of the 10 seats in stead of four.
(source of figures: T.C. Yüksek Seçim Kurulu Başkanlığı and NTV/MSNBC Seçim 2007.
Seed planted by Bancki — 23 July 2007 @ 10:19
In the constituencies where DTP endorsed more than one ‘independent’ candidate, DTP ensured that the support for those candidates was evenly spread by dividing these provinces in equal ‘regions’ and asking their voters to vote for the candidate assigned by the party to that ‘region’:
“The first plan is to divide provinces into smaller regions in order to ensure that all DTP candidates receive an equal share of the vote by assigning specific regions to individual candidates.
While preparing their election placards, the DTP placed the photos of each candidate with a list of regions underneath in an effort to ensure all votes don’t go to a single popular candidate.
In Diyarbakır, four candidates were assigned regions according to the support the party received in the 2002 elections. The party calculated that each candidate would need 60,000 votes to get its candidate elected from Diyarbakır.”
(source: Turkish Daily News)
I think this tactic was used in Taiwan too when SNTV was still in use there.
Seed planted by Bancki — 24 July 2007 @ 05:03
Turkish presidential election update & correction
Turkey’s newly elected parliament must still attempt to elect a president, because the term of the current president has expired and thus it is not constitutionally permissible to wait for possible voter approval in October of the referendum on direct presidential elections.
Scion grafted by Fruits and Votes — 25 July 2007 @ 14:23