Turkey’s general election campaign enters its final stretch on Monday with the outgoing government confident it will increase its share of the vote but facing a much reduced majority in the new parliament.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister and leader of the Justice and Development party (AKP), predicted at the weekend his party would win 40 per cent of the popular vote next Sunday, and get between 310 and 315 seats in the 550-seat parliament.
That would be sufficient to allow the AKP, which has its roots in political Islam, to form another single-party administration.
Analysts say this is investors’ preferred outcome. Despite the controversial circumstances in which the election was called, Turkey’s financial markets have remained steady in anticipation of another term for the centre-right, pro-business party.
Mr Erdogan called the election early after he failed to get Abdullah Gul, the foreign minister who has past links to Turkey’s Islamist movement, elected by parliament to the symbolically secular post of president.
The AKP had more than 350 seats in the old parliament, in which only two parties were originally represented. But this time, because at least three parties are expected to win the minimum 10 per cent of the vote needed to get into parliament, the party’s majority will be reduced substantially.
Up to 40 independent candidates, most of them representing the ethnic Kurdish vote, are also likely to be elected, diluting the seat distribution further.
An opinion poll published last week by Raymond James, a brokerage firm in Istanbul, predicted the AKP would win only 298 seats despite raising its share of the popular vote to 41 per cent compared with 34 per cent at the last election in 2002. The election is being held four months ahead of schedule to try to bring an end to a constitutional crisis that pitched Turkey’s governing institutions, including the military and the courts, into an ideological battle over the presidency.
The attempt to appoint Mr Gul as president was derailed at the end of April after the military issued an ultimatum about a threat to Turkey’s secular republic.
The issue has failed to ignite the campaign because the AKP has such a big lead in the polls and because the opposition – on the secular left and the nationalist right – has failed to make much of an impression outside its core constituencies. Rallies have, on the whole, been sparsely attended, which some candidates blame on a prolonged heatwave.
Mr Erdogan is campaigning on a record of economic reform. The main opposition Republican People’s party has focused on secularism and the threat of terrorism, after several serious incidents in recent months. Nationalists want the restoration of the death penalty and an end to the sale of Turkish assets to foreign investors – an issue some candidates say is resonating with voters outside the cities.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/014ebaf6-32f8-11dc-a9e8-0000779fd2ac.html
