"Turkey: admiration and apprehension
While other European politicians battle to avoid the blame for economic downturn, Mr Erdogan claims the credit for economic success
Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, boasts an election-winning record of which other European leaders can only dream. Sunday's general election victory for his AKP party was not just his third in a row. It was also his most emphatic yet. When the AKP first won power in 2002, it got 10.7m votes and a 34.3% share. On Sunday, on an 87% turnout that puts other countries to shame, Mr Erdogan hoisted those figures to 21.4m (double his 2002 support) and a 49.9% share. Bizarrely, under Turkey's idiosyncratic proportional representation system, this means the AKP now has 326 members in the 550-seat parliament, compared with 363 in 2002. But this decline in AKP seats, though politically very important, should not detract from a stellar electoral achievement."
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