Turkey: the Phantom Election
by Sungur Savran
Turkey’s elections have stunned the whole world. A turnaround of such a magnitude in a matter of five months is probably unprecedented in electoral history. Having lost a full one fifth of its electorate (nine percentage points) in the general elections of 7 June earlier this year, the AKP of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, now president of the republic and formerly prime minister, made an unbelievable comeback in the snap elections held on 1st November. It regained all that it had given away earlier, receiving close to half the popular vote. Two million votes taken away from the fascist party, the MHP; one million from the HDP, the predominantly Kurdish party; half a million form a fundamentalist Islamist party, the predecessor of the AKP, and another million from new strata that came to vote at a higher rate this time. By any standards, the volatility of the electoral figures, to use purposefully a term popular in stock market jargon, is extremely intriguing.
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