Turkey’s June 12 Elections: Will Erdogan Maintain His Ascendance?

Turkish voters go to the ballot boxes on June 12, 2011 to decide if the governing Justice and Development Party (JDP), which has been in office for just over eight and a half years, will win its third successive general electoral victory. Almost every opinion poll published before the June 2 deadline on election propaganda has shown a clear lead for Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan‟s party and it will be a stunning surprise, comparable to that of the triumph which brought it into power in November 2002, if the JDP fails to win comfortably.

In the last general elections in July 2007, the JDP received 46.58 percent and thus increased its share of the vote by almost 12 percent compared to the 2002 elections. However, as the table below shows, the JDP‟s seats in the 550 member Turkish General National Assembly (TGNA) actually decreased from 363 to 341 as the National Action Party (NAP), which had failed to pass the 10 percent national threshold for parliamentary representation in the previous elections, succeeded in entering the TGNA in 2007.