Turkey’s ruling party wins majority in parliament, 3 Armenians reelected

PanARMENIAN.Net - Turkey's ruling party secured a stunning victory in Sunday, November 1 snap parliamentary election, sweeping back into single-party rule only five months after losing it, the Associated Press reports.

Markar Yesayan from the ruling AK Party, Selina Dogan from the Republican People's Party (CHP), and Garo Paylan from pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) were reelected into the Parliament.

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu declared victory as results reported by state-run TRT television showed that the ruling Justice and Development party, or AKP, had won more than 49 percent of the vote and was projected to get 316 seats in parliament. The preliminary result, reported after about 99 percent of the votes were counted, would give the party a comfortable majority in the 550-seat parliament.

Following the vote, Davutoglu struck a conciliatory tone, asking ruling party supporters to remain solemn and to embrace fellow Turks.

"Today is the day of victory but it is also a day for humility," Davutoglu said, addressing supporters in his hometown of Konya, where he voted.

Speaking from the balcony of AKP headquarters, Davutoglu also pledged to uphold freedoms and called for opposition parties' support for constitutional amendments to make Turkey's laws more democratic. It was not clear if the party had abandoned contentious plans to change Turkey's political system to one that would give the president more powers.

Davutoglu spoke vaguely about pressing ahead with a peace process with the Kurds, but said Turkey was determined to continue to fight Kurdish rebels, who are considered terrorists.

The vote was a rerun of a June election in which AKP surprisingly lost its one-party rule due to a strong showing by a Kurdish party. Most analysts had expected AKP to fall short again, but the preliminary results suggest it picked up millions of votes at the expense of the nationalist MHP and pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party, or HDP. AKP's vote tally jumped nearly nine percentage points. The secularist CHP was hovering around the same result as in June.

With a dramatic gain that few had predicted, the ruling party's gamble to hold new elections paid off. Supporters at the party's Ankara and Istanbul headquarters waived flags in rapturous celebrations. Crowds outside President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's home in Istanbul shouted "Turkey is proud of you."

"The election result has shown that the people have opted for stability and trust that had been endangered in the June 7 vote," Erdogan said.

HDP leaders attributed the drop-off in their votes to the violence and unfair election conditions.

HDP's co-chairman Selahattin Demirtas said the party was forced to cancel election rallies and television stations gave party representatives little air-time amid government attacks branding the party as the political wing of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, which is considered a terrorist organization by Turkey and its allies.

"I regret to say that there wasn't a fair or equal election... We were not able to lead an election campaign, we tried to protect our people against attacks," he said.

Turnout in the election was about 87 percent among the 54 million people eligible to vote at more than 175,000 polling stations. The national election board usually takes days to certify the final vote count.