How Turkey's new electoral law will affect outcome of May 14 polls

Photo: AA/File

The MP candidate lists of the parties to run in the May 14 elections were finalized at 5 p.m. local time yesterday (April 9).

Twenty-six parties will compete for the 600 seats in the parliament in the dual election. Half of the parties will run under five alliances while the other half will run individually.

The ruling People's Alliance seeks to maintain the parliamentary majority against the two major opposition alliances — the Nation's Alliance and the Labor and Freedom Alliance.

According to opinion polls in March, the voting rate of the People's Alliance and the main opposition Nation's Alliance is between 35 and 45 percent, whereas the third alliance led by the Green Left Party's support is around 10 percent. No other contenders, apart from a few independent MP candidates, are expected to make it into the parliament.

For the three alliances, candidate lists have been considered crucial for the outcome of the election due to the latest amendment to the election law. Enacted a year ago, the amendment changed how MPs are distributed to the parties in each electoral district.

The amendment

According to the previous law, seats were first distributed to alliances in proportion to their respective voting rates and then distributed within the alliances. With the amendment, the seats will be distributed directly to the parties according to the D'hondt method, hence the parties in the same alliance will compete against each other.

Since the total number of votes cast for an alliance will not be a factor in determining the number of seats to be distributed to the parties, the votes for the smaller parties in alliances will be worthless if they fail to win seats.

For example, if a party gets 90,000 votes in a polling district where 100,000 votes are needed for one seat in the parliament, it will end up failing to win a seat and taking possibly crucial votes away from the larger parties in the same alliance.

Had this system been implemented in the 2018 election, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its ally Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) would get 13 more seats while the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) and its ally Good (İYİ) Party would get 18 fewer seats, according to a calculation. 

With the new system, the total votes of an alliance will only determine whether it has surpassed the national electoral threshold of 7 percent. All three major alliances have significantly higher voting rates than the threshold while no other party or alliance is expected to reach that.

The opposition's tactics

The Nation's Alliance has chosen to create "alliances within alliances" in electoral districts throughout the country to mitigate the disadvantages. Candidates of the four smaller parties in the alliance will compete as candidates of the Republican People's Party (CHP), to switch back to their parties once elected. Some 76 candidates from the four parties will run under the umbrella of the CHP, with about 30 having a considerable chance of being elected, Gazete Duvar reported yesterday. 

The alliance will have two separate candidate lists in most districts, one for the CHP and one for the İYİ Party. In 16 provinces, these two parties have merged their lists as well, with the CHP representing the alliance in nine provinces and the İYİ Party in seven provinces.

The parties' choices to run separately or jointly may be decisive about who will get the parliamentary majority, according to a simulation on siyasett.com, a database website about Turkey's politics. Naci Koru, a former high-level diplomat who explained his simulation in an article on the YetkinReport website, wrote, "... if alliances fail to cooperate and run in the election with multiple lists, the number of deputies they will win is significantly reduced. On the contrary, if they compete with a single merged list, the number of deputies increases considerably."

Another factor forcing the parties into joint lists is a provision in the election law that if a party nominate candidates separately, it should do it in at least 41 provinces.

The Green Left

All but one of the political parties that make up the Kurdish-led Labor and Freedom Alliance will run in the upcoming election under the Green Left (Yeşil Sol) Party. The Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), the largest party in the alliance, has decided to compete under the Green Left in case it is closed before the elections due to a pending closure case.

The alliance has also decided not to field a presidential candidate in what is seen as an implicit endorsement of Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the CHP leader and the Nation's Alliance candidate who seeks to end Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's two-decade rule. However, the Workers' Party of Turkey (TİP) has chosen to field candidates separately in 41 provinces and has nominated a range of well-known people, including journalists, actors, and a trans activist.

According to polls in March, the TİP has gained up to 3 percent support, a level that has not been seen in decades for a party that identifies as socialist. Currently, the TİP holds four seats in parliament. In the 2018 election, two of its MPs, including the chair, were elected as HDP candidates, while one MP from each of the HDP and the CHP switched to the TİP.

Despite the TİP's growing popularity, its decision to field candidates separately has been criticized by the alliance, as it may take crucial votes away from the Green Left and even the Nation's Alliance.

Gültan Kışanak, a prominent Kurdish politician who has been in prison since late 2016, was among the critics.

"... as a socialist Kurdish woman who has been resisting and paying a price in prison for the past seven years, I'd like to remind you that the HDP and the Green Left Party, which will participate in this election, are the joint party of the Kurdish socialists, patriots and the socialist movement of Turkey. So, the TİP is not the only socialist party in the parliament," she wrote in an article published on April 3 in the daily Yeni Yaşam.

"Taking these facts into consideration, I underline that no one has the right to waste a single vote," she wrote.

Selahattin Demirtaş, the imprisoned former co-leader of the HDP, backed Kışanak, calling on the TİP to join the Green Left in the election, which the party eventually refused.

The TİP says its decision will not lose any seats to the opposition and believes it will win several seats in the parliament. 

The ruling bloc

The People's Alliance, which comprised three parties until recently — the AKP, the MHP and the Great Unity Party (BBP) — has absorbed three other parties over the past month.

The New Welfare (Yeniden Refah) Party, run by Fatih Erbakan, the son of former PM Necmettin Erbakan, who led the Welfare Party, which Erdoğan was also a member of before leaving to establish his AKP, decided to join the alliance in late March. The Free Cause Party (HÜDA-PAR), a Kurdish Islamist party, and the Democratic Left Party (DSP), a popular party led by former PM Bülent Ecevit in the 1990s are the two other new members of the alliance. Candidates of these two parties have been nominated by the AKP whereas the MHP, the New Welfare and the BBP will run with their separate lists.

Unlike the two major parties in the Nation's Alliance, the AKP and the MHP did not merge candidate lists in any province. In an unexpected move, the MHP on April 6, three days before the due time, submitted its candidate lists for all 81 provinces. Over the past week, reports in the media suggested that the AKP would try to convince the MHP to create joint lists, which didn't happen. The MHP had made the decision after the new additions to the alliance.

This might be the development to affect the outcome of the election the most significantly, according to Derya Kömürcü, head of the Yöneylem polling company. The People's Alliance might end up with 15 to 20 seats less than it could win, he asserted in a tweet.

Initially, when the law amendment was introduced, it was widely perceived as an attempt by the ruling bloc to secure more seats with fewer votes, as the Nation's Alliance appeared more divided at the time. But now the candidate lists suggest otherwise. It remains to be seen if the AKP and MHP's strategy will have unintended consequences. (VK)