ISTANBUL — Turkish voters are scheduled to flock to the polls in the general elections on May 14 to elect a president of the republic, in addition to 600 members of parliament for the next 5 years, according to an amended election law whose amendments entered into force on April <>, after being approved a year earlier.
The early 2018 elections were held under a revised election law and a presidential system of government for the first time in the country, and resulted in President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) alliance with the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) winning a parliamentary majority.
But this time the elections may involve surprises, not only because of the decline in the popularity of one party or the advancement of another, but also as a result of amendments to the electoral law, which observers believe will have unexpected repercussions on the distribution of parliamentary seats.
There were 14 articles amending the electoral law, some of which provide more opportunities for smaller parties by lowering the electoral threshold, while others narrow these parties by depriving them of some of the advantages of entering into electoral alliances.
The ruling coalition, which prepared the bill, said it aims to reform the electoral system, reset the impact of alliances on the distribution of deputies to become fairer, and strategize electoral alliances instead of turning them into a grouping of marginal parties capable of imposing their visions on larger parties by bargaining over their votes. The opposition saw the law as aimed at avoiding the decline in the popularity of the ruling party and its partner, and weakening opposition alliances.
Here are the most prominent amendments to the new electoral law, which commentators say is changing the rules of the electoral game in the country.
Lowering the electoral threshold
The new electoral law lowered the electoral threshold from 10 to 7 percent, as any political party running in elections must obtain this percentage to enter parliament.
For decades, the 10% threshold ensured that the parliament consisted of only 4 to 5 large parties, and was aimed at preventing the entry of small and marginal parties and leading to the fragmentation of parliamentary blocs. While consensus is that they should be reduced, the disagreement is based on the optimal ratio. Overall, reducing it to 7% would enable more smaller parties to run and enter parliament.
The electoral threshold for the party, not the alliance
The new law now requires a party to enter parliament to achieve the electoral threshold with its own votes in each constituency, and it is no longer sufficient for it to enter parliament if its alliance crosses the threshold.
This means that the chances of smaller parties entering parliament have declined significantly, significantly reducing the importance of electoral alliances.
Preventing the movement of deputies and canceling the parliamentary bloc requirement
The amendments also included banning the movement of deputies from one party to another, and abolishing the newly formed party's parliamentary bloc from being eligible to run in elections even if it did not meet the organizational requirements.
To facilitate understanding of the significance of this double amendment, the most common example in this regard is the maneuver made by the Republican People's Party in 2018 when it granted 15 deputies to the Good Party, after it split from the nationalist movement and left it with 5 deputies at the time, in order to meet the requirement of having 20 deputies in order to run in the elections.
Without borrowing deputies from the CHP, the Good Party would have had to have held at least one general congress and formed an organizational structure in half of Turkey's provinces six months before the vote, which the party was unable to provide following the announcement of the early elections.
Completion of regulatory requirements for eligible parties
This amendment complements the previous one, as it aims to tighten the conditions for the participation of new parties in the elections, unless they complete their organizational structure and hold their periodic conferences according to periods and conditions specified in the law.
After the parliamentary bloc was abolished as a sufficient condition for running in the elections, the amendments required the party eligible to participate in the elections to hold its conferences at the level of districts, governorates and major bodies twice in a row in the last six months before the elections. The previous law limited the holding of organizational conferences once in the same period.
Who benefits from the amendments?
Said al-Hajj, a researcher specializing in Turkish affairs, believes that the new law first targets the newly established small parties, especially the Future Party and the Democracy and Progress parties, as well as the Peoples' Democratic Party.
In a previous article in Al Jazeera Net, Al-Haj argued that the law reduces the chances of small parties allied with large ones, so that it is difficult for them to win outside the electoral districts in which they have overwhelming popularity, even if they ally with the strongest existing parties.
However, the head of the Metropole polling center, Ozer Singer, believes in a previous comment that most of the changes made are technical adjustments, but the ruling coalition aims mainly to reduce the influence of the alliances, yet these adjustments may be in favor of both the ruling coalition and its opposition as well.
Research by the SITA Center for Studies in Ankara concluded that the lowering of the electoral threshold in the recent amendment is not against small parties, but in their favor, and that alliances are still mandatory for smaller parties to cross the threshold.
It is noteworthy that the small parties in the Six-Table Alliance decided to run in the elections within a unified joint list with the Republican People's Party, while the Good Party preferred to run on its own lists while cooperating with the Republican People's Party in some districts.