Turkey official results to announce 'within 11-12 days'
The official results of the 25th Turkish parliamentary general election will be announced “within 11 or 12 days”, the supreme election committee chairman says.
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According to unofficial results, four political parties, including the Justice and Development (AK) Party, pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), Republican People’s Party (CHP), and Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) had surpassed the 10-percent election limit needed to obtain any seats in the parliament, Sadi Guven told reporters in the capital Ankara late on Sunday.
"According to unofficial results, AK Party, CHP, MHP, and HDP have surpassed the 10-percent election threshold," he said, adding,"The official results will be announced in 11 or 12 days". The turnout was 86.47 percent, he added.
According to the unofficial results, Turkey's AKP won its fourth consecutive general election Sunday but failed to gain the majority needed to form a single-party government.
With 99.86 percent of ballots counted, AKP secured 40.79 percent of the vote, giving the party 258 seats in the Grand National Assembly -- 18 short of a simple majority.
The second-placed CHP secured 25.07 percent of the vote to take 132 seats while the MHP gained 16.38 percent to gain 81 seats. And the pro-Kurdish HDP won 12.98 percent of the vote to take 79 seats, marking the first time it will ever enter the parliament as a party.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP party has gained much less than the current 327 and the 330 parliament seats required for calling a referendum on changing the constitution.
Erdogan, who was elected president in August 2014 after over 11 years of serving as prime minister, was confident before the election that he could transform Turkey into a presidential republic.
To achieve this, the ruling party needed to gain 367 seats (two-thirds of the parliament), to easily push for constitutional changes to increase the powers of the president, without popular vote.
“Erdogan has got his first defeat in his political life…President Erdogan is number one loser and the second one is Turkey’s prime minister,” Huseyin Bagci, a professor in Middle East University in Ankara, told Press TV late on Sunday.
The president now holds a largely ceremonial role under the current constitution.
"I wholeheartedly congratulate everyone," HDP co-chair Selahattin Demirtaş told journalists in his first post-election speech, describing the result as a "magnificent victory.”
“As of this moment, the debate on the presidency, the debate about dictatorship, has come to an end in Turkey. Turkey has returned from the edge of a cliff,” Demirtaş said at the HDP’s provincial building in Istanbul, together with the party’s co-chair Figen Yüksekdağ.
He stressed that they would not form a coalition government with the Justice and Development Party as they had promised throughout the campaign.
“We will not form a coalition with the AKP, we stand behind our words. We will be in parliament as a strong opposition,” Demirtaş vowed.
Supporters of the HDP took to the streets to celebrate the pro-Kurdish party’s first entry into the parliament. The Kurds had earlier run only as independents and their parties had been locked out of the parliament.
The peace talks between the Turkish government and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), aimed at ending decades-long conflict, have stalled in recent months.
Oktay Vural, the deputy chairman of Turkey's MHP, said on Sunday that it was too early for him to say whether it would consider forming a coalition government with the AK Party.
The MHP has long been seen as the most likely potential partner for the ruling party.
