Turkey Election Results
From WSJ for subscribers only: ISTANBUL—Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan scored a landslide victory in parliamentary elections Sunday but failed to gain enough seats to rewrite the country’s constitution alone, according to unofficial results.
As voting begins in Turkish elections, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan is to set to win a third consecutive term in office. Video courtesy Reuters.
.Mr. Erdogan’s Islamic-leaning Justice and Development Party, or AKP, won 50% of all votes cast, against 26% for its nearest rival, the Republican People’s Party, according to unofficial results from the Cihan news agency, working with Turkey’s national election board.
If correct, that would confirm Mr. Erdogan’s unrivalled position on Turkey’s political scene and create momentum for him to carry through his goal of redrafting the constitution, political analysts said.
Mr. Erdogan could also press to change Turkey into a presidential republic, as he has said he wants to do, although he would now need to secure some support outside his party. Such a move would potentially see him rule this strategically important Muslim nation of 75 million people until 2024, were he to win presidential elections due in 2014 and serve out two terms.
But on Sunday night, as he spoke to a cheering, flag waving crowd of supporters in Ankara, Mr. Erdogan sought to send out a conciliatory message to the 50% of Turks who voted against him.
“We will be more moderate in the next period,” he said, calling on all sides of the political debate to put behind them what had been at times a dirty and violent election campaign. “The nation gave us a message to make a new constitution by consensus.”
.An AKP victory had been widely expected, not least because the economy grew 8.9% last year in a remarkable recovery from the global downturn. Mr. Erdogan’s high international profile, expansive foreign policies and tough stance towards Israel also proved popular among voters.
“The fact that after eight years in power they could win even within a few percentage points of what they gained in 2007 is an extraordinary victory by any standards. This is a landslide,” said Soli Ozel, a prominent Turkish columnist and political analyst. The AKP won 47% of the vote in 2007, and 34% in 2002.
The campaign was hard fought as Mr. Erdogan sought to secure enough votes to give him the 330 seats out of 550 in parliament that he needs to be able to rewrite the constitution without support from other parties, and put it to a popular referendum for approval.
That’s a potentially divisive goal in a nation deeply split over the proper role of Islam in society. The potential for political turmoil had worried some investors already concerned that Turkey’s economy may be overheating and in need of urgent government action to cool it.
But on Sunday Mr. Erdogan promised to negotiate the new constitution with opposition parties and to consult with academics and the media. The new constitution would be “built entirely on civil liberties,” he said, in apparent response to critics who accuse him of authoritarian tendencies and of crushing press freedoms.
The Cihan agency said the AKP would get 326 seats in the new parliament.
Critically, the nationalist National Movement Party, or MHP, looked set to make it back into parliament, clearing a 10% threshold. Had the MHP fallen below the threshold, its votes would have been redistributed to the two main parties, putting the AKP comfortably above 330 seats.
On Sunday night, MHP deputy chairman Faruk Bal accused the AKP of “dirty tricks” during the campaign, which he said had affected the result. Ten senior MHP members were forced to resign last month, after sex tapes in which some of them featured were released on the internet. Mr. Erdogan has denied any AKP involvement.
The AKP lost a limited number of votes in Kurdish areas to the Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party, or BDP, likely as a result of Mr. Erdogan’s decision to court nationalist voters by taking a harder line on the country’s Kurdish problem.
Turkey’s constitution remains widely associated with an era of so-called “military tutelage,” in which Turkish governments were elected but had limited freedom to act, with the possibility of a further coup always present.
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Associated Press
An elderly Turkish woman casts her ballot in Yayladagi, Turkey, near the Syrian border.
.At the same time, several candidates currently awaiting trial on charges of being members of a terrorist conspiracy to topple the government, looked set to get seats in parliament based on the unofficial results, apparently winning a sympathy vote.
The Republican Peoples Party says the trials, which include hundreds of defendants from army generals to journalists, amount to a political witch hunt. Among the defendants who appear to have won parliamentary seats were a journalist and a university professor.
—Yeliz Candemir contributed to this article.
Write to Marc Champion at marc.champion@wsj.com