See how the parties have competed for different voter groups since 2002
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Any election that is genuinely competitive involves shifting voter loyalties where parties compete for the support of groups that did not vote for them last time around. Turkish elections are no different.
But what are these groups in Turkey and how have they voted in the past?
What follows is a heavily simplified series of charts that helps to illustrate how shifting party loyalties among certain voter groups shaped Turkish elections since 2002.
Inspired by Venn diagrams, it places voters in eight broad categories and illustrates how political parties appealed to different combinations of them in different elections.
Here are the voter groups we’ll be using:
A few disclaimers:
- These groups are not equally-sized. There are far, far more socially conservative people in Turkey than liberals, to name just one example.
- They are not mutually exclusive, either: it is entirely possibly for individual voters to identify themselves with two, perhaps three categories.
- And of course, there are other voter groups not illustrated here.
That said, it is a useful tool to explain voting patterns in recent elections and to understand how the parties are positioning themselves in the 2018 election.
Pick an election year to get started and scroll down for some commentary:
Commentary
3 November 2002 was a watershed election in Turkish history. Not one of the five parties previously elected to parliament won seats; in their place were two new ones: the AK Party and the CHP.
A vast swathe of the electorate – accounting for 45 percent of voters – voted for parties that did not make it into parliament, including Alevis, Kurds and Turkish nationalists.
Commentary
A sweltering 22 July 2007 was the day of a snap election, called after the courts and military rejected the governing AK Party’s nominee for president, Abdullah Gül.
By now, the AK Party had established itself as the main party of the centre-right, commanding support from social conservatives, religious voters and a fair few Kurds. A significant number of liberal-minded, business-friendly voters also backed the party in this election in protest at the circumstances in which it was called.
After the populist Youth Party split the nationalist vote in 2002, this election marked the return of the nationalist MHP to parliament.
The CHP consolidated its hold onto the centre-left by forming an alliance with the DSP, once a major rival.
This also marked the first time Kurdish MPs entered parliament on their own steam, elected as independent candidates before banding together to form the DTP.
Commentary
The 2011 election was the first in Turkey for many decades that was not held early and took place when it was scheduled to happen.
AK Party leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ran a fiercely nationalistic campaign in the hope of straying onto the MHP’s turf and attracting enough votes to push them belong the 10 percent threshold. Many did turn to him, but the MHP did scrape enough votes to remain in parliament.
This was the CHP first contest under newish leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu and its best performance since the 1970s.
A well-organised network of independent candidates helped to elect an even larger group of Kurdish MPs to parliament, this time under the guise of the BDP.
Commentary
For the AK Party, the June 2015 election was one of retreat. Kurds and Turkish nationalists abandoned the party for the MHP and HDP respectively, helping to deprive it of an overall majority in parliament.
The CHP lost some ground among Alevi, liberal and left-wing voters to the HDP, but generally held steady.
Commentary
In November 2015, the AK Party regained the ground it lost in June by persuading Kurdish and Turkish nationalist voters to return to them. The MHP and HDP took heavy losses as a result. The result was an AK parliamentary majority.
JamesInTurkey.com
