Turkey revises election law in risky bid to block breakaway conservatives
Lowering the election threshold could boost the ruling coalition’s number of parliamentary seats, but there's no guarantee.
ISTANBUL — Turkey has amended its electoral threshold law, reducing the proportion of nationwide votes a party needs to enter parliament from 10% to 7%. The change is widely seen as an effort to divide the opposition.
The 10% threshold — the highest in the world — was introduced by generals after a 1980 coup, purportedly to put an end to the political turmoil and violence of the 1970s. It required a party to achieve at least 10% of all votes across the country to enter parliament and was generally seen as a bid to stop Kurdish and leftist parties from gaining representation.
Votes cast for parties that do not pass the threshold are distributed to other parties according to their ballot share in specific constituencies.
The previous threshold served the current Justice and Development Party (AKP) government, notably when the party came to power in 2002. In that year, many parties failed to reach the national threshold and some 46% of votes were redistributed, giving the AKP more than two thirds of seats despite winning it only 34% of the vote.
