The previous general election were held on May 14, 2023, and the second round of the presidential election was held on May 28, 2023. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has been in office since 2014, was re-elected president in the 2023 elections. The AKP, which received 35.62% of the votes in the general elections, came in first place, winning 268 of the 600 seats in parliament. The main opposition party, the CHP, entered parliament with 169 seats.
Due to the alliances formed after the elections, 4 deputies elected from the AK Party lists went to the Free Cause Party, 1 deputie to the Democratic Left Party, 15 deputies elected from the CHP went to the DEVA Party, 10 deputies each to the Future Party and SAADET, 3 deputies to the DP, 2 deputies elected from the Green Left Party went to the EMEP, 2 deputies to the HDP and 1 deputy to the TÖP, thus creating a parliamentary distribution in which 16 parties are represented.
Hatay MP Can Atalay, who was imprisoned due to the Gezi Park case, could not attend the oath-taking ceremony held on June 2, 2023. He was subsequently stripped of his parliamentary seat.
According to the Constitution of Turkey, any amendment to the election law can only apply a year after it comes into effect.[2]
Lowering of the electoral threshold
At the initiative of the ruling AKP and its main political ally MHP, the national electoral threshold for a party to enter parliament was lowered from 10% to 7%.[3] This was the first lowering of the threshold since it was introduced by the military junta following the 1980 Turkish coup d'état.[4]
There is no threshold for independent candidates.[5] Political parties can also opt to contest the election in a political alliance with other parties, removing the 7% requirement as long as the alliance as a whole wins more than 7% of the vote in total.[6]
Other amendments to the election law includes the distribution of seats. Previously, parliamentary seats were distributed based on the vote share of each election alliance in any given district. Now, the seats are distributed based solely on the vote share of each political party in that district. If applied to the previous elections, the results would have been slightly more in line with the preferences of the voters on local level. For example, one Erzurum seat from IYI (4th largest party in Erzurum) would have gone to HDP (3rd largest party in Erzurum) and one Elazığ seat from CHP (3rd largest party in Elazığ) to MHP (2nd largest party in Elazığ).[7]
Turkey is split into 87 electoral districts, which elect a certain number of members to the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. The Assembly has a total of 600 seats, with each electoral district allocated a certain number of MPs in proportion to their population. The Supreme Electoral Council of Turkey conducts population reviews of each district before the election and can increase or decrease a district's number of seats according to their electorate.
In all but four cases, electoral districts share the same name and borders as the 81 provinces, with the exceptions being Ankara, Bursa, İzmir and Istanbul. Provinces electing between 19 and 36 MPs are split into two electoral districts, while any province electing above 36 MPs is divided into three. As the country's most populous provinces, Bursa and İzmir are divided into two subdistricts while Ankara and Istanbul are divided into three. The distribution of elected MPs per electoral district is shown below.[8]
