Looking Beyond the June 12 Elections

The June 12, 2011, national elections looked as normal as a democratic election could look in the Turkish polity. Did the elections signal that a stable pattern of parliamentary politics is likely to continue? The chances were that the same party groups would return to the parliament, but how many seats would each of them have? There were several potential scenarios. If the MHP got about 5 million votes and if the CHP received around 30 percent of the vote, even though the AKP obtained close to 50 percent of the votes, it might barely win a simple majority in the parliament and form the government alone. Or if the MHP failed to get 4 million votes and the Kurdish nationalists failed to get more than 20 seats, with no more than a few non-Kurdish independents winning any seats, the AKP and the CHP would share all the remaining seats among themselves. If we focus only on these two more likely scenarios of a simple versus super AKP parliamentary majority, we would realize that the consequences for Turkish democracy would be dramatically different.