The dominant party of Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan triumphed in the parliamentary elections on Sunday, winning a majority of seats.
Preliminary results showed Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) was set to win at least 49 percent of the vote and a majority of seats in parliament. That is a stunning reversal of fortune after the elections in June, where AKP won only about 41 percent of the vote in the inconclusive general elections.
Sunday’s vote was riddled with scattered allegations of irregularities, but none suggested systematic fraud. Official results are set to be announced within two weeks.
With nearly all votes counted, the results showed the center-left Republican People’s Party (CHP) with 26 percent of the vote, the ultra-nationalist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) with 12 percent of the vote, and the pro-Kurdish and liberal People’s Democratic Party (HDP) winning just a fraction over the 10 percent threshold needed to gain a bloc in Turkish parliament.
The results differed drastically from repeated polls showing Turks would vote largely as they did in the June vote.
“The Turkish people backed the narrative of gaining stability, the narrative in which AKP argued that the reason why Turkey was going through instability was because it had lost the ability to form a single-party government,†says Sinan Ulgen, a former Turkish diplomat and scholar at Carnegie Europe.
