The Turkish elections were held today and Erdogan’s AKP, who only won 40.8% of the vote last June, won big today with just under 50% of the vote. This guarantees the AKP single party control of the government as Erdogan so desperately wanted. Only 276 seats were needed to achieve this so they have won overwhelmingly today with around 316 seats.
At the current time though it doesn’t appear that the AKP has enough seats (320 needed) to issue a referendum on changing the constitution and make Erdogan Sultan of Turkey, but they are so close to that number it wouldn’t surprise me if they managed work something out somehow.
Here’s the near final layout of the parliamentary seats won today with 96.48% of the votes counted:
Just for comparison sake, here’s what the 2015 June election results looked like when the AKP lost their hold on the government:
That’s a significant percentage increase for the AKP, with only one polling group even predicting a result close to this for the AKP at 47%, with the rest predicting AKP would only do a little better than in June at around 41-43%:
There have been worries about cheating in today’s elections by the AKP. Here’s what Today’s Zaman wrote about it yesterday:
Opposition parties have been alarmed by claims that the results of the Sunday election could be manipulated.
Their concerns were reinforced by a government whistleblower who tweets under the pseudonym Fuat Avni. In some of his latest tweets, Fuat Avni argued government figures are holding regular meetings on election fraud and the Anadolu news agency will play a central role by announcing public support as high as 55 percent for the AK Party on the night of the election.
The Cihan news agency, the only other agency that reports on ballot box results all across Turkey, will be subjected to cyber attacks to prevent it from releasing the results of the ballot box, Fuat Avni also claimed.
…
[Erdal Aksünger, a chief adviser to the CHP chair] said at the beginning of the week the names of around 672,000 people who cast their votes in the June election are missing from the voter lists prepared for the Nov. 1 election.
According to Aksünger, in addition to the approximately 672,000 missing names, about 422,000 new names that did not appear on the June 7 election list have been added to the current voter lists.
Noting that perhaps some 200,000 people may have died since the June election, Aksünger said: “But there are still [at least] 472,000 others unaccounted for. On the other hand, there are 422,000 additional voters on the lists of the Nov. 1 election. This is interesting and we believe this is something that needs to be investigated for the sake of election security.”
With this large an increase in the votes for AKP, I think the foregone conclusion on the minds of many inside Turkey and beyond will be that there was massive cheating to achieve this big of a percentage change since June. But with much (if not all) of the critical media silenced in Turkey by Erdogan’s kangaroo courts recently, I’m not sure there will be wide reporting of these claims in Turkey.