Turkey's Election Results - More Of The Same

Turkey's incumbent President Erdoğan is a strong favorite in a runoff election for Turkey's Presidency.  He missed a first round win by less than 0.5 percentage points, with more than 5% of the vote cast for a nationalist third-party candidate who was previously an MP for a nationalist party that is part of the President's party's coalition in Parliament. The third-party vote needs to break more than 90.5% in favor of the opposition candidate for him to win in the runoff, but seems likely to break more than 50% in favor of the President. The President would also win if third-party candidate supporters simply failed to vote in the runoff election on May 28 at all.

The incumbent President's right wing Justice and Development party (AKP) has retained control of parliament in a People's Alliance coalition with far right ultra-nationalists including the Nationalist Movement party (MHP) and another far right nationalist party, against a challenge primarily from the center-right Nation Alliance opposition coalition of the runner up in the race, and a center-left to far-right Labor and Freedom Alliance opposition coalition.

Turnout was stunningly high by U.S. standards at 88.9% and was a record for Turkey despite disorder caused by recent earthquakes, ongoing tensions with Kurdish militants, and the fact that there is far less money available in Turkey to fund election administration.

The West would have preferred the center-right opposition candidate who made it to the runoff election for the Presidency and won almost 45% of the Presidential election vote, and a coalition of the two opposition Alliances in parliament (with a broad center-right to left wing tent) which won about 46% of the parliamentary seats, mostly due to the authoritarian tendencies of incumbent President Erdoğan. But this isn't going to happen.

Geographically, Southeast Turkey (which is heavily Kurdish and has higher total fertility rates than the rest of Turkey) is left leaning, the Aegean coast and a swath of central Turkey centered around Ankara is center-right leaning. The "heartland" outside the major cities which is everywhere else, is right leaning to far-right nationalist leaning. At a more fine grained level, the center-right to far right break is basically an urban-rural divide, with smaller regional cities also leaning center-right.

Tens of millions of Turkish voters went to the polls on Sunday to cast their vote in the presidential and parliamentary elections. Here is where the vote stands at the moment:

* President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his main rival, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, will go head-to-head in a runoff election after Erdoğan outperformed expectations but failed to reach the 50% threshold to win the presidential race outright. The president scored 49.51% against Kılıçdaroğlu’s 44.88%, with a small number of overseas votes left to count. The head of the supreme electoral board said even when the remaining 35,874 uncounted overseas votes were distributed, no one would secure the majority needed to win the elections outright. The runoff will take place on 28 May.

* A nationalist third candidate, Sinan Oğan, emerged as a potential kingmaker after picking up 5.17% of the vote.

* Official turnout reached a record 88.9%. . . .

* Erdoğan’s rightwing party retained control of parliament through an alliance with ultra-nationalists.

From the Guardian. 

The Top Party In Each Electoral District (for larger districts above and smaller districts below). Yellow is the ADK. Brown is the far right nationalist MHP. Red and blue are part of the Nation Alliance coalition. Purple is part of the Labor and Freedom Alliance.

In the People's Alliance, the AKP won 267 seats (301 is a majority), the MHP won 50 seats, and a smaller nationalist party won 5 seats, for a total of 322 seats which is a safe majority even though it is a loss for the coalition of about 22 seats from before the election. The runner up's center-right Nation Alliance coalition won a combined 212 seats in parliament. A third center-left to far-left Labor and Freedom Alliance coalition without a Presidential candidate won a combined 66 seats. The third-place Presidential candidate's right wing Ancestral Alliance coalition won no seats in parliament since it didn't meet the minimum percentage threshold of the vote to win any seats. Neither did the revolutionary Socialist/Communist Union of Socialist Forces. The final count isn't absolutely complete, so the total number of seats for each party could change slightly before becoming final. (Source).

There are 11 other linguistic-ethnic minorities in Turkey, but only Arabic (generally along the more eastern part of the Syrian border) and the Zaza language (of a Northwestern Iranian sister ethnicity to the Kurds whose language is linguistically perhaps as similar to Kurdish as Portuguese is to Spanish) are even locally very significant. They mostly overlap or abut the Kurdish regions in the Southeast. (Source for the two maps above and this paragraph.)