Turkey Elections 2015: AKP Wins Majority

Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has won Turkey’s parliamentary election, regaining the majority it lost in June.

Qccording to Turkish state-run Anadolu Agency, with almost all ballots counted, AKP had won 49.4% of the vote, with the main opposition CHP on 25.4%.

PM Ahmet Davutoglu called the result a “victory for our democracy and our people”.

The pro-Kurdish HDP crossed the 10% threshold needed to claim seats.

The nationalist MHP will also take seats in Ankara.

Polls had indicated the AKP would receive only between 40-43% of the vote, in line with how it fared in June, when it lost its majority for the first time in 13 years.

Attempts to form a coalition government after the June election failed.

With almost all of the results counted, the AKP won substantially more than the 276 seats needed to get a majority, allowing it to form a government on its own.

However, the AKP fell 14 seats short of the amount needed to call a referendum on changing the constitution and increasing the powers of the president, the party founder Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

With 60 more seats, the new government would have been able to bring in those changes without a referendum.

The AKP’s opponents had said the vote was a chance to curb what it sees as the increasingly authoritarian tendencies of Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Since elections in June, a ceasefire between the Turkish army and militants from the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) collapsed after a suicide bombing in July by suspected Islamic State (ISIS) militants.

The attack near the border with Syria killed more than 30 Kurds.

Turkey then suffered its deadliest attack in its modern history when more than 100 people were killed after a peace rally in Ankara attended by mainly left-wing demonstrators, including many HDP supporters, was targeted by two suicide bombers.

The government said they were linked to ISIS.

Critics have accused Recep Tayyip Erdogan of renewing violence to curb support for the HDP – something the government denies.

The HDP won 10.7% of the vote – enough to give it 59 parliamentary seats, 21 fewer than it claimed in June’s election.

The party cancelled rallies following the Ankara attack, and its co-chairman Selahettin Demirtas said on November 1 that it had not been “a fair or equal election”.

Clashes were reported in the mainly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir as the results were being counted. Reuters said police fired tear gas at protesters throwing stones.