Turkish elections results reinforce Erdogan’s reign

Elections in Turkey garnered evoked mixed emotions across the country. (AP)

Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, secured a surprise win at the polls Sunday. The conservative party of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan won nearly half the votes to regain its parliamentary majority.

With nearly all the votes counted, the AKP, led by Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, won 49.41% of the votes (316 seats), followed by the Republican People’s Party with 25.38% (134 seats), according to preliminary results released by the semiofficial Anadolu News Agency.

While the pro-Kurdish HDP crossed the 10% threshold needed to claim seats in parliament, but it got 21 fewer seats than in June’s election.

In a statement, Erdogan said the election result showed people chose environment of stability and confidence and asked people to respect the election’s turnout.

Meanwhile, some European observers said that violence marred the run-up to polls in Turkey in which the Justice and Development Party (AKP) regained its majority.

In a statement on Monday, Ignacio Sanchez Amor, head of the OSCE observer mission, said: “Physical attacks on party members, as well as the significant security concerns, particularly in the south-east” had affected campaigning.
He added that pressure on journalists – including a police raid on the Koza-Ipek media group in Istanbul last week – was a major concern, according to BBC reports.

It’s known that the elections took place against a backdrop of widening violence, with a double suicide bombing in Ankara last month, which was the deadliest terrorist attack ever on Turkey, as well as renewed violence in Kurdish areas between security forces and the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) after the collapse of peace talks in recent months.

Daily Turkish newspapers had a say in how to report the elections’ results, as the independent mass-circulation Hurriyet and Milliyet focus on the scale of the ruling AKP’s win, while opposition papers accuse the authorities of scaring voters with the prospect of civil strife.

Cumhuriyet sees the “victory of fear”, while the Sozcu tabloid thinks “terror has increased”. The left-wing daily Taraf accuses President Erdogan of using a “chaos plan” to whip up public insecurity, and the pro-Kurdish Ozgur Gundem predicts a “new era of struggle”.

On the other hand, the prime minister and AKP leader, Ahmet Davutoglu, tweeted “Elhamdülillah” or “thanks to God”, before emerging from his family home in the central Anatolian city of Konya to tell crowds of cheering supporters that the win was “a victory for our democracy, and our people”. Davutoglu is now expected to start the process of forming a new government.