Turkish general election, June 7th 2015
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  Turkish general election, June 7th 2015
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Zanas
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« on: May 18, 2015, 05:03:50 AM »

Are we not discussing one of the 10 or 12 (depending on who you count in) most populated countries where there are competitive or at least semi-competitive elections?

There is a general election in Turkey on June 7th, 2015.

They have a truly awful electoral system : 85 districts electing 2 to 31 members through D’Hondt PR. BUT, you have to get 10% of the vote nationally to be eligible to this way of repartition! AND if you fail to hit 10% nationally, even if you get 9.9%, all your votes get transferred to… the leading party nationally. -____-"

Though that looks bad, the 10% threshold actually has nothing to do with the AKP, being in place since 1983 and the first election following the 1980 Army coup. I guess it was put in place to stop fringe groups from taking too much traction in elections. I don’t know if the transfer of spoilt ballots to the winner dates back to that as well, or is an invention of the AKP.

Still, it seems independents are not subject to the 10% threshold and can win seats proportionally in their district, prompting a number of candidates, especially Kurdish ones in the South-East, to run that way, at least in previous elections.

Opposition parties are confronted with growing media bias and electoral fraud year after year.

A 10% threshold necessarily reduces the field, and we have four parties who can possibly make it.

AKP – Justice and Development Party

It’s Erdogan’s party, the growingly “natural” governing party of Turkey, ie. growingly doing what he can to secure its position. It originated in reformist Islamism, but has now abandoned the official reference, running on “conservative democracy”, which is telling… It’s a cronyist clientelistic party, verging on authoritarian. They have more than half municipalities, provinces, and seats in the Assembly. They aim at winning more than half the votes, and ideally (for them), more than 2/3 of seats (367/550), which would allow them to pass constitutional changes through Parliament. Failing that, they would settle for 3/5 (330/550), where they can put constitutional changes to a referendum.

CHP – Republican People’s Party

It’s the main vaguely centre-left opposition party to the AKP, heir to Mustafa Kemal’s party. It seems to have a hard time merging its social democratic, kemalist and republicanist traditions. They’re aiming to become the “reasonable” opposition, they would love to be coined as the democratic resistance to Erdogan’s authoritarianism by the Western media, but it’s more complicated. They perform best among upper middle class, ie. in the West and South-West coastal regions. They say they’re aiming at 35%, they would be ecstatic with 30%, they’re actually polling less.

MHP – Nationalist Movement Party

The nationalist far-right, linked to the “Grey Wolves” paramilitary group. They’re trying to wash themselves a bit from that tradition, but they’re still the option for nutjobs who find Erdogan too nice to Europe, Armenia, Kurds, or anything not 100% Turkish. They performed quite well in the 2014 local elections, garnering 17% of the vote. But in the presidential election later in 2014, they actually sought to nominate a joint candidate with… the CHP, to have a “broad-tent” opposition presidential candidate. They actually ended supporting CHP’s candidate. So it may be a bit trickier than just “far-right” here and “social democracy” there…

HDP – People’s Democratic Party

The HDP is a recent national outfit, designed to be able to run in all of Turkey. It originates on the one hand from the BDP, a Kurdish democratic socialist party, and on the other hand from the HDK, a coalition of various left-wing movements in the rest of Turkey. The merger of these results in a left-wing collegial organization comparable to Syriza or Podemos. It actually takes a very left-wing stance on a number of subjects. Keep in mind that Turkey, for all the misconceptions the media can convey, must be home to the greatest number of left-wing splinter parties in the whole world. They nominate women for half of their candidates, and 10% are LGBT candidates. They are a rising star in Turkish political life, having polled 6% in the local elections, mostly in the mainly Kurdish South-East, and having polled nearly 10% in the following presidential election, where their support expanded a bit geographically, mostly in cities (9% in Istanbul, 8% in Izmir, but 1% or 2% in most of the rural West). Kurdish candidates don't have to run as independents to hope winning seats this time, they run for the HDP, but they also could lose all representation.

Opinion polling in Turkey is quite partisan, each poll is not particularly reliable in itself, but if you combine all of them you actually get a pretty decent picture. Current polling has :

AKP 44%
CHP 26%
MHP 16%
HDP 10%

The main question mark is therefore whether HDP will make it to the threshold. If so, AKP’s life could be a bit more complicated. If not, that’s 9% lost votes automatically granted to them, and they should win big.

I made this summary not being a particular expert in Turkish politics, though not completely ignorant of them either, so feel free to complete or correct.
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« Reply #1 on: May 18, 2015, 05:17:50 AM »

I made this thread a while back, and my computer crashed lol. Tongue today is an intersting day to start this thread - the HDP headquarters have been carbombed just a few hours ago.

That 10% threshold has led to some hilariously disproportionate results in the past. In the election that bought AKP to power, every single party in parliament was ejected, and almost half of the votes were discarded as they were below threshold.

Basically, although the AKP will win; Erdogan is now so fruitloops with power that even the people who backed him because of how horrendous the opposition are are stirring. Erdogan really, really wants a semi-presidential system and, apparently FPTP.

The CHP and MHP are closer than you might think idealogically. Not a nice party, the former. Neo-Kemalists are terrible.
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Velasco
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« Reply #2 on: May 18, 2015, 05:47:56 AM »

Hey Sigmund, I have no time for this now. Anyway I wrote a rather long thing this summer about the presidential election. Take a look, it's in Spanish.

https://saintbrendansisland.wordpress.com/2014/09/02/elecciones-presidenciales-turcas-de-2014/

Needless to say that I root for Demirtas and the HDP.
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jaichind
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« Reply #3 on: May 18, 2015, 01:02:33 PM »

This entire system of the 10% threshold but does not apply to independents is a bit weird.  I think in 2007 and 2011 the Kurdish BDP actually had their candidates run as independents and then rejoin BDP after taking their seats.  What is also interesting about the 10% is that AKP actually gained vote share in 2007 from 2002 and 2011 from 2007 but lost seats in both 2007 and 2011 due to the massive distortion of the 2002 election handing AKP massive number of seats with a fairly small 34% of the vote. 

This time around I guess AKP will be in the lower 40s so unless HDP does not cross the 10% threshold which I doubt after all these bombings, we will have a deadlock.  I am not sure what the official position of MHP and HDP going into a post-election alliance but I suspect it will be very awkward.  But CHP, MHP and HDP all hate AKP so I am not sure how government formation will take place.  I guess HDP will break ranks and ally with AKP ? Given the political affects it does not seem to me that the AKP is responsible for the blasts since all that will do is to make sure the Kurdish vote consolidates around HDP and deny AKP its majority. 
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Dan the Roman
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« Reply #4 on: May 18, 2015, 05:10:41 PM »

This entire system of the 10% threshold but does not apply to independents is a bit weird.  I think in 2007 and 2011 the Kurdish BDP actually had their candidates run as independents and then rejoin BDP after taking their seats.  What is also interesting about the 10% is that AKP actually gained vote share in 2007 from 2002 and 2011 from 2007 but lost seats in both 2007 and 2011 due to the massive distortion of the 2002 election handing AKP massive number of seats with a fairly small 34% of the vote. 

This time around I guess AKP will be in the lower 40s so unless HDP does not cross the 10% threshold which I doubt after all these bombings, we will have a deadlock.  I am not sure what the official position of MHP and HDP going into a post-election alliance but I suspect it will be very awkward.  But CHP, MHP and HDP all hate AKP so I am not sure how government formation will take place.  I guess HDP will break ranks and ally with AKP ? Given the political affects it does not seem to me that the AKP is responsible for the blasts since all that will do is to make sure the Kurdish vote consolidates around HDP and deny AKP its majority. 

An HDP alliance with the AKP would have been plausible five or six years ago, or if Abdullah Gul had succeeded Erodgan, but not only is the AKP sufficiently authoritarian to have united the opposition, but Syria has made a hash of its relations with the Kurds. The Turks have been really ambiguous in their attitude towards ISIS in its battles with the Kurds in Iraq and Syria, and the author of that policy is now the AKP Prime Minister. Given that the CHP increasingly is the party of educated liberal Turks, and the HDP wants to be a socially liberal policy, both fear the AKP's foreign policy an alliance wouldn't be that hard. That just requires the MHP to come onboard, and they did back the CHP in the Presidential race.

Or the AKP could just not rig it and conveniently get enough votes, sort of like how Erdogan just avoided a runoff in the Presidential race
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« Reply #5 on: May 18, 2015, 05:24:12 PM »

Can the MHP and HDP stomach each other?
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Middle-aged Europe
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« Reply #6 on: May 19, 2015, 04:08:40 AM »

HDP – People’s Democratic Party

The HDP is a recent national outfit, designed to be able to run in all of Turkey. It originates on the one hand from the BDP, a Kurdish democratic socialist party, and on the other hand from the HDK, a coalition of various left-wing movements in the rest of Turkey. The merger of these results in a left-wing collegial organization comparable to Syriza or Podemos. It actually takes a very left-wing stance on a number of subjects. Keep in mind that Turkey, for all the misconceptions the media can convey, must be home to the greatest number of left-wing splinter parties in the whole world. They nominate women for half of their candidates, and 10% are LGBT candidates. They are a rising star in Turkish political life, having polled 6% in the local elections, mostly in the mainly Kurdish South-East, and having polled nearly 10% in the following presidential election, where their support expanded a bit geographically, mostly in cities (9% in Istanbul, 8% in Izmir, but 1% or 2% in most of the rural West). Kurdish candidates don't have to run as independents to hope winning seats this time, they run for the HDP, but they also could lose all representation.

I can't believe that there's finally a Turkish political party I could support. Tongue
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Velasco
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« Reply #7 on: May 19, 2015, 04:26:32 AM »

Can the MHP and HDP stomach each other?

Of course not. Turkish far-right nationalists hate what the HDP and BDP "sister parties" represent.
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« Reply #8 on: May 19, 2015, 04:54:47 AM »

Err yeah, that was rhetorical. Probably should have made that clearer...

Before Erdogan's recent descent into Orbanesque wannabe dictator I would have said the historic aminosity between the Kemalists and the Kurds was so great, the Kurds would have certainly propped up Erdogan (who they haven't done that bad under) instead of the CHP and their fascist allies. Now I'm not so sure - the situation of either propping up a upstart-turned-semi-autocrat or a bunch of nationalist idiots really reminds me of Hungary
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minionofmidas
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« Reply #9 on: May 19, 2015, 05:02:06 AM »

They have a truly awful electoral system : 85 districts electing 2 to 31 members through D’Hondt PR. BUT, you have to get 10% of the vote nationally to be eligible to this way of repartition! AND if you fail to hit 10% nationally, even if you get 9.9%, all your votes get transferred to… the leading party nationally. -____-"
Um, no.

(Yes, I see the unsourced line in the wiki article that can be understood to mean that. But it doesn't. What happens is that as the no. of seats per constituency is fixed, if a lot of the vote in any one province falls prey to the threshold then the seats can be won on very low vote numbers. Elections up to and including 2002 were often hilarious in that respect. Heck, everything about the military-operated quasi-democracy of the 90s was hilarious if you didn't have to live in it.)
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minionofmidas
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« Reply #10 on: May 19, 2015, 05:08:46 AM »


The main question mark is therefore whether HDP will make it to the threshold. If so, AKP’s life could be a bit more complicated. If not, that’s 9% lost votes automatically granted to them, and they should win big.
Incidentally, this is true in practice though not in theory - since the results all over Kurdistan* will presumably be along the lines of HDP 45-60, AKP 35-50, Kemalists at joke levels, again.
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Velasco
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« Reply #11 on: May 19, 2015, 05:22:13 AM »

Before Erdogan's recent descent into Orbanesque wannabe dictator I would have said the historic aminosity between the Kemalists and the Kurds was so great, the Kurds would have certainly propped up Erdogan (who they haven't done that bad under) instead of the CHP and their fascist allies. Now I'm not so sure - the situation of either propping up a upstart-turned-semi-autocrat or a bunch of nationalist idiots really reminds me of Hungary

Yes, there is no choice to be made. Still, the CHP has a relatively decent 'socialdemocratic' leader. Kilicdaroglu is from Dersim (the Alevi province called Tunceli by Turks) and his Wiki page says that his family has a Zaza ethnic origin like that of Demirtas. However, CHP and MHP are coupled by their common Turkish nationalism. As long as the old-fashioned Kemalism doesn't evolve...  
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Famous Mortimer
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« Reply #12 on: May 19, 2015, 05:24:47 AM »


The main question mark is therefore whether HDP will make it to the threshold. If so, AKP’s life could be a bit more complicated. If not, that’s 9% lost votes automatically granted to them, and they should win big.
Incidentally, this is true in practice though not in theory - since the results all over Kurdistan* will presumably be along the lines of HDP 45-60, AKP 35-50, Kemalists at joke levels, again.

In the presidential election, the CHP actually beat out the AKP in Eskişehir. What was the deal there?
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Velasco
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« Reply #13 on: May 19, 2015, 05:34:18 AM »

In the presidential election, the CHP actually beat out the AKP in Eskişehir. What was the deal there?

Eskisehir is not in the Kurdistan, but in central western Anatolia. In the presidential election it was the join CHP-MHP candidate whom beat Erdogan by a narrow margin. In the 2011 election it was the AKP the party with the most votes and presumably it will happen the same in 2015. The provincial capital leans CHP, though.
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minionofmidas
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« Reply #14 on: May 19, 2015, 05:36:10 AM »


The main question mark is therefore whether HDP will make it to the threshold. If so, AKP’s life could be a bit more complicated. If not, that’s 9% lost votes automatically granted to them, and they should win big.
Incidentally, this is true in practice though not in theory - since the results all over Kurdistan* will presumably be along the lines of HDP 45-60, AKP 35-50, Kemalists at joke levels, again.

In the presidential election, the CHP actually beat out the AKP in Eskişehir. What was the deal there?
The AKP never took more than three of the six seats there, so hardly an unusual result.

No idea what's driving relative Kemalist strength there and couldn't do any better than guessing that the usual reasons (settlement of post 1918 DPs, military presence) also apply here.
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ag
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« Reply #15 on: May 19, 2015, 07:18:39 AM »


The main question mark is therefore whether HDP will make it to the threshold. If so, AKP’s life could be a bit more complicated. If not, that’s 9% lost votes automatically granted to them, and they should win big.
Incidentally, this is true in practice though not in theory - since the results all over Kurdistan* will presumably be along the lines of HDP 45-60, AKP 35-50, Kemalists at joke levels, again.

In the presidential election, the CHP actually beat out the AKP in Eskişehir. What was the deal there?
The AKP never took more than three of the six seats there, so hardly an unusual result.

No idea what's driving relative Kemalist strength there and couldn't do any better than guessing that the usual reasons (settlement of post 1918 DPs, military presence) also apply here.

Universities, I beleive.
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Zanas
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« Reply #16 on: May 19, 2015, 09:12:13 AM »
« Edited: May 19, 2015, 09:22:30 AM by Sigmund »

They have a truly awful electoral system : 85 districts electing 2 to 31 members through D’Hondt PR. BUT, you have to get 10% of the vote nationally to be eligible to this way of repartition! AND if you fail to hit 10% nationally, even if you get 9.9%, all your votes get transferred to… the leading party nationally. -____-"
Um, no.

(Yes, I see the unsourced line in the wiki article that can be understood to mean that. But it doesn't. What happens is that as the no. of seats per constituency is fixed, if a lot of the vote in any one province falls prey to the threshold then the seats can be won on very low vote numbers. Elections up to and including 2002 were often hilarious in that respect. Heck, everything about the military-operated quasi-democracy of the 90s was hilarious if you didn't have to live in it.)

Ok, thanks, it did struck me as a bit odd. Do you happen to have a guide to their electoral system lying somewhere ? Or I guess I'll try google-translating Turkish wiki...

edit : nothing on Turkish wiki. But I went and changed English wiki so it would be more accurate.

The way I understand it, if in constituency X there are five seats and the results are the following :

HDP 70
AKP 25
CHP 15

then if the HDP hits 10% nationally they will get 4 seats and AKP one in this constituency, and if they fail to hit 10% nationally, then the AKP will get 3 seats and the CHP 2 seats?

Still a completely undemocratic and moronic system...
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minionofmidas
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« Reply #17 on: May 19, 2015, 12:40:26 PM »

Yes, that is perfectly correct.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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« Reply #18 on: May 19, 2015, 01:36:11 PM »

I guess this gives me a good excuse to post those maps again...




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Zanas
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« Reply #19 on: May 19, 2015, 01:47:36 PM »

I'm not familiar with patterns inside Istanbul, could you describe the broad areas of good performance of each candidate ? Demirtas seems to poll better in the second circle of the city, not the centre and not the exurban areas, why would that be ?
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minionofmidas
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« Reply #20 on: May 19, 2015, 01:56:47 PM »
« Edited: May 19, 2015, 01:58:19 PM by only back for the worldcup »

I'm not familiar with patterns inside Istanbul, could you describe the broad areas of good performance of each candidate ? Demirtas seems to poll better in the second circle of the city, not the centre and not the exurban areas, why would that be ?
I think those strong Demirtas areas are plenty far on the outskirts of the city. The three outermost districts, though officially in the city, are essentially countryside.

Anyways, the one is a 60s/70s built banlieue with lots of Kurdish rural migrants and the other is a 90s/2000s built banlieue with lots of Kurdish rural migrants.
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jaichind
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« Reply #21 on: May 20, 2015, 12:16:02 PM »

MetroPoll Arastirma tweets result of its May poll, showing AKP support at 42.8%, CHP at 27%, MHP at 17.1% and HDP at 9.2%, with the latter missing the threshold necessary to gain representation in parliament.
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Velasco
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« Reply #22 on: May 21, 2015, 02:43:10 AM »

Leading party by province in the 2011 general election:

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jaichind
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« Reply #23 on: May 25, 2015, 10:26:17 AM »

Gezici poll

AKP          38.2
CHP          30.1
MHP          17.1
HDP          10.5
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jaichind
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« Reply #24 on: May 26, 2015, 08:28:24 AM »

Andy-Ar poll


AKP           41.9
CHP           25.8
MHP           16
HDP           10.7
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