Articles

16 Parties – No Choice, No Change

Turkey’s general elections promise a continuation of today’s schisms

If democracy is about choice, have sympathy for the Turks. On July 22, their ballot slips will be up to 210 centimetres wide, the width required to include all 16 parties and independent candidates for the electoral district in question. But the real options are limited, both because of the rules of the game and because of the unsavoury characteristics of those involved.

First, the rules. These mean that there are only two ways your vote results in your being represented in Turkey:

• If the party you support gets over 10% of the national vote, or
• If the independent candidate you back gets the share of the local vote required – this share being calculated according to the number of candidates in the electoral district

The 10% baraj was introduced in the 1980s to prevent the party representing the Kurds being represented in Turkey – not that it kept them out as they formed an electoral alliance with the then social democrats. In 2002, its application meant that only two parties qualified for the Grand National Assembly, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AK Party, whose 34.3% of the vote translated into 66% of the seats in the Assembly and Deniz Baykal’s Republican People’s Party (CHP) whose 19.4% of the vote won them 32.4% of the seats. The 41.4% of voters who voted for the eight other parties in the elections went unrepresented.