Turkey Elections 2018
Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been elected as the first executive president of Turkey under the new presidential system. His party’s alliance, the People’s Alliance, secured a majority of seats in parliamentary elections on Sunday.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been elected as the first executive president of Turkey under the new presidential system. His party’s alliance, the People’s Alliance, secured a majority of seats in parliamentary elections on Sunday.
Turkey will choose its new president and MPs on June 24 and will become a presidential republic from a parliamentary one, as a result of last year's referendum. Here we explain the changes that will come into effect following the elections.
Around 60 million Turks will head to the polls on June 24 to choose their new president and parliament members. If no presidential candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote in the first run, the run-off will be held on July 8.
Main opposition left-wing party, CHP, is in an electoral alliance with three right-wing and conservative parties to run in the June 24 elections. The idea of forming alliances is to give small parties a chance of having seats in the parliaments.
Ten political parties are running in Turkey's parliamentary elections, seven of them set up two electoral alliances. Three parties support incumbent President Erdogan for the presidential election on the same day, while others appear as opposition.
Erdogan stepped into politics at an early age with the conservative MSP. In 1994, he was elected mayor of Istanbul from MSP’s successor, the Welfare Party. Conservative parties faced lawsuits for violating secularism back then; eventually the WP was closed, too. He founded the AK Party in 2001 and won all the elections since then. After 11 years of premiership, Erdogan became the first popularly elected president in 2014.
The AK Party, the MHP and the BBP have been cooperating since 2016. The cooperation was constructed on the basis of the two then opposition parties’ support for the AK Party government in its fight against the FETO and the PKK terror groups. AK Party’s list in the ballot will include BBP’s parliamentary candidates, while MHP will have its own list.
Founded in 2001, the governing Justice and Development (AK) Party has won 5 general elections, 3 local elections and 1 presidential election since 2002. The party has 316 seats in the 550-seat parliament.
The Nationalist Movement Party was founded in 1969 by Alparslan Turkes, a prominent figure for Turkey’s anti-communists. The MHP took 11 percent of the vote in the 2015 elections and won 40 seats in parliament.
BBP is a conservative and nationalist party, created in 1993 by Muhsin Yazicioglu, who was killed in a helicopter crash in 2009. In 2015, the BBP received 0.5 percent of the vote and has no seats in parliament.
The left-wing and secularist CHP, the main opposition party, has set up an alliance with two right-wing parties, the Iyi Party and the DP, and a conservative one, the SP, in order to prevent them from being left out of parliament because of the threshold. CHP’s list in the ballot will include DP’s parliamentary candidates, while Iyi Party and SP will have their own lists.
CHP, the oldest political party of Turkey, founded in 1923 by M. Kemal Atatürk, founder of the republic. In 2015, it received 25 percent of the vote and won 134 seats in parliament, becoming main opposition party.
In 2017, former MHP senior Meral Aksener separated from the party and founded Iyi (Good) Party. It has only 6 seats in parliament now and is running in elections for the first time since its foundation.
The conservative SP was founded in 2001 after Virtue Party was banned from politics by secularist judges. Despite coming from the same political background as AK Party, SP failed to send any members to parliament.
The Democrat Party has merged with two other right-wing parties: the ANAP (Homeland Party) and the DYP, both of which used to be powerful in the 1990s. The party has no seats in parliament.
The conservative HUDA-PAR was founded in 2012. The party’s small-scale organisations are mostly active in Kurdish-majority areas of Turkey. It has no seats in parliament.
The HDP boasts a strong support base in the Kurdish-majority areas of Turkey. It sent 59 MPs to parliament in 2015, but 11 of them were expelled after standing trial on terrorism charges.
The Vatan (Patriotic) Party is a left-wing political party that describes itself as a vanguard of socialism. Its leader, Dogu Perincek, has had close links to Russia since the Soviet Union.
