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In Turkish Vote, Ruling Party Wins By Wide Margin
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Turks on Sunday gave Justice and Development the biggest percentage of votes in decades for a ruling party seeking a return to power. The party won about 340 of 550 seats.
Although the percentage of votes it received was up from the 34 percent it commanded going into the last parliament, the number of seats it won this time fell slightly and still is short of the 367 that Justice and Development would need to unilaterally name a new president.
While the military remains one of Turkey's most popular institutions and few criticize it publicly, many voters and political analysts interpreted Justice and Development's wide margin of victory as an endorsement of Erdogan in the face of the military's attempted intervention in politics in April.
"These are the people's orders" to the military, Hasan Cemal, a columnist for Milliyet newspaper, told Turkish TV.
The strong support shown for Erdogan's party Sunday would help insulate it from the military in the future, said Ali Carkoglu, a political analyst at Sabanci University in Istanbul. The military "basically cannot do anything, with that nearly 50 percent support," Carkoglu said. "This is not a banana republic. They can't tell them how to behave."
The Justice and Development Party is seeking European Union membership for Turkey.
It has resisted appeals from the military for the government to allow Turkey's armed forces to cross into northern Iraq to attack guerrilla bases of Turkish Kurds. Turkey has battled Kurdish separatists on its soil for decades and strongly resents the rise of a virtual Kurdish state in neighboring Iraq under U.S. military protection.
Public anger over the issue helped bring a third party, a far-right nationalist one, into parliament with Sunday's vote. The presence of the nationalists will complicate foreign policy, in particular, for Justice and Development.
A secularist left-wing party lost seats in Sunday's elections, although it still hit the 10 percent mark necessary to enter parliament.
Independent lawmakers, including about two dozen Kurds, also won posts Sunday.
