Turkey’s Islamist Party Wins Landslide Election Victory

How people in Turkey are reacting to these results. The resumption of hostilities between Kurdish militants and the state, including a recent terrorist attack on 10 October, at a peace rally in Ankara that claimed 100 lives may have played a hand in Sunday´s election results.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu declared victory, saying: “Today is the day of victory of democracy and the people”. “Over 87 per cent of the people have turned out”, said freelance journalist Dorian Jones, reporting for CBC from Istanbul.

“The AK Party’s victory is important in terms of the sensitive developments now going on in the region”, the groups said in a joint statement.

Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, secured a surprise win at the polls Sunday.

As we explained in a previous article, Turkey’s voting system is on a PR basis.

A left-leaning Turkish news magazine said on Monday its offices were raided by police and two editors detained over a cover suggesting election results would deepen divisions and trigger conflict in the country. His strategy proved effective, securing major gains at the expense of the far-right nationalists with the cynical promise that he alone could restore the stability that he had undermined.

“But it’s still a big victory, we have lost one million votes but we have stood tall against this policy of massacres and fascism”, he said.

The OSCE said the “challenging security environment, in particular in the south-east, coupled with a high number of violent incidents, including attacks against party members and campaign staff, as well as on party premises, hindered contestants’ ability to campaign freely”.

The AK Party, founded by President Tayyip Erdogan, won close to 50 percent of the snap vote according to unofficial results, following widespread violence in the mainly Kurdish southeast and a crackdown on media critical of the government. The conservative party of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan won almost half the votes to regain its parliamentary majority. This was precisely the outcome of the June elections, after which the inability of the AKP and Turkey’s other main parties to agree on a government produced a “hung parliament” and Sunday’s re-run elections.

“Unfortunately, the campaign for these elections was characterised by unfairness and, to a serious degree, fear”, said Andreas Gross, head of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) delegation.

There is now the hope that the two sides may be spurred to return to peace talks.

Turkey’s economic growth slid to less than three percent last year and is expected to stagnate at similar levels next year, which economists say is not enough to create jobs.