Why do young voters matter?
First-time voters make up 8% of the Turkish electorate and their votes will be decisive
Sixty-four million Turks were eligible to cast their vote in these elections – and five million of those were first-time voters, aged between 18 and 22.
Erdogan and his AK Party have ruled the country since 2002, so these young voters haven’t known any other party in power in their lifetime.
In the decade before 2002, Turkey was ruled by coalition governments which tended to change with elections every two to three years.
So what will young voters – who may not care about the political problems of the past – decide? Credible opinion polls in Turkey suggest around 70% of them don’t trust the AK Party with their future.
Read more here about young voters in Turkey and what they want.
East and West: Which way does Turkey face?
Soner Cagaptay
Washington Institute think tank
For hundreds of years, the Ottoman Empire dominated what are now around 50 sovereign countries. However, starting in the 18th Century, the once-mighty empire entered a long and steady state of decline. Gradually digesting their state’s weaknesses in comparison to Europe, generations of Ottoman sultans started to borrow institutions, laws, and traditions from the great powers in Europe in order to revive Ottoman greatness.
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who founded modern Turkey in 1923 after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, furthered this model, by reformatting the country in his own image as a secular, West-facing and European society. Copying European states – the global powers of the inter-war era – in statecraft, he aimed to place Turkey on a trajectory that would eventually revive the country’s great nation status.
Enter Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who since 2003 has tried to reshape the country in his own image as socially conservative, politically Islamist and Middle Eastern. His ultimate goal: reviving Turkey’s great power status. However, his pursuit for greatness for Turkey is not unusual. In many ways, it aligns with the longstanding policies that have shaped his country’s former leaders, from the late Ottoman sultans to Ataturk.
However, Erdogan’s path is different compared to his predecessors. While the others folded Turkey under the West and copied Europe to restore its global influence, Erdogan has picked an unorthodox model: his goal is to make Turkey great as a standalone power first, in the Middle East, and then globally.
In the end, Turkey is both European and Middle Eastern, and I believe that it will eventually settle somewhere in between Ataturk’s and Erdogan’s visions, embracing its non-exclusive identities: European and Middle Eastern, secular and Islamic, West and East.
Erdogan’s AKP predicted to lose 28 seats in parliamentary election
Turkish voters didn’t only vote to pick a new president today, they also voted to fill 600 seats in parliament.
Erdogan’s AK Party (AKP) has garnered the most votes, but it didn’t do as well as its leader did.
AKP received 35% of the votes, with more than 96% of the votes counted, according to state news agency AA. This is AKP’s worst score since it was first voted in back in 2002 when it got 34.28% of the votes.
Since then, the party has never polled less than 40% of the votes.
We can also see the number of their seats in parliament has decreased since then. In 2002, AKP won 363 seats. Since then, even though their numbers dropped in every election, the party has never had fewer than 300 seats.
In the 2018 elections, that number went down to 295.
Today’s results, with 35% of the votes, suggest AKP will have 267 MPs, losing 28 seats.
But through its alliance with three other parties, it is expected to win another 56 seats. That would give Erdogan’s alliance a majority in parliament with 323 seats.
Back in the 2018 election, his alliance won 344 seats.
Third candidate Ogan to decide who to support ‘soon’
The third candidate in the presidential election, Sinan Ogan, who garnered around 5% of the votes according to both Turkish news agencies, has said his bid for the presidency changed the outcome of the vote.
It’s not official yet but echoing Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Kemal Kilicdaroglu’s statements earlier, Ogan said a second round was likely to be held.
If that becomes official, Ogan won’t be in the running for it – and his decision on who he will ask his supporters to back might make a big difference.
He says he will decide on this in a few days’ time: “I will speak to the leaders in my alliance, I will go and ask my voters in the coming couple of days. And then we will make a decision and perform our duty in the next 14 days.”
Sources from: BBC.COM
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