Since Turkey switched to presidential system, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has made an alliance with the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) as it is neither able to secure a parliamentary majority on its own nor to get 50 percent plus one vote that is required for the election of the president.
However, even the combined votes of the two parties are far from 50 percent, according to recent polls. Thus, they are working on a new election law that will maximize the number of their seats in the parliament.
The only part of the new law that they have so far disclosed to the public is that the election threshold will be lowered from 10 to 7 percent.
On August 29, President and AKP Chair Erdogan said that they had reached a preliminary agreement with their allies to set the threshold as 7 percent.
By lowering the threshold now, the ruling alliance may be hoping that the Peoples' Democratic Party 's votes will slightly drop as many people are believed to have voted for it just to make it remain in the parliament.
Recent opinion polls suggest that support for the AKP has shrunk to as low as 25%, a first. Unsurprisingly, Erdogan is now scrambling to woo back the pious Kurds who until recently voted for him in droves.
For 16 years Erdogan as prime minister, and then president, tightened his grip on Turkish politics, proving forecasters of all hues wrong about his ability to remain in office, including seeing off an attempted coup d’etat in 2016. He, however, suffered a significant setback on 23 June.
Erdogan’s hardline on a wide section of the opposition as a response to the coup may have troubled his people. It has certainly concerned countries in Europe and North America.
Turkey possessed a relatively independent judiciary. But thousands of judges were purged after the coup and replaced by pro-Erdogan justices. Besides, all concerned function in an atmosphere of tension.
Under Erdogan, Turkey has also sunk like a stone in international human rights and press freedom indexes.
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