Can Erdogan Stay at the Helm?

Policy Notes (The Washington Institute for Near East Policy) No.25, May 2015

Soner Cagaptay *

On June 7, Turkey will hold national parliamentary elections. The ruling Justice and Develop – ment Party (AKP), which has led the country since 2002, will almost certainly win this race. Ironically while an AKP victory is certain, it is difficult to estimate the number of seats the party will win in the Turkish legislature. If the smaller Kurdish nationalist Peoples Democratic Party (HDP) crosses the 10-percent electoral threshold necessary for parliamentary representation, the AKP’s majority in the Turkish legislative will be a relatively small margin, if any. Should the HDP fail the threshold, however—currently polls show that party’s popularity hovering around 10 percent—the AKP would pick the HPD’s seats in the country’s Kurdish southeast. This would endow the govern – ing party with a solid majority in the legislature, allowing it to amend the constitution and usher in a presidential system with AKP founder Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the helm.

* Soner Cagaptay, the Beyer Family Fellow and director of the Turkish Research Program at The Washington Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Rise of Turkey: The Twenty-First Century’s First Muslim Power (Potomac Books), named by the Foreign Policy Association as one of the ten most important books of 2014.

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