Turkey will reduce the electoral threshold to enter Parliament to 7%

Istanbul, 24 Mar The constitutional commission of the Turkish Parliament approved on Thursday a proposal for legal reform to lower the controversial electoral threshold for entry into Parliament from 10 percent, the highest in the world, to 7 percent. The legal text, which has yet to be voted on in Parliament, was approved with the votes of the government coalition, the Islamist AKP and the ultra-nationalist MHP, after 17 hours of uninterrupted debate, with moments of great tension, reports Turkish daily Evrensel. The law, whose future approval is taken for granted by providing for the AKP-MHP majority coalition in Parliament, lowers the electoral threshold to 7 percent, in what opposition deputies have described as a tailor-made reform of the MHP, whose voting potential hovers around that percentage in the polls. The 10 per cent threshold had been introduced in 1983 by the military junta to prevent the Kurdish left party from reaching Parliament, but since 2015 the HDP, which represents this sector of voters, has exceeded that mark in every election. Socialist MP Sera Kadigil accused the Government of preparing this reform to avoid defeat in the next elections, scheduled for June next year, as the text also changes the way seats are calculated. The rule, introduced in 2018, of opening the Chamber to all parties of a coalition if it exceeds the threshold is maintained, but the seats in each electoral constituency will be distributed according to the actual vote of each party, not the coalition. The opposition also criticizes that the new law no longer prohibits the president from using public resources for the election campaign, thus legalizing what they consider to be a hitherto fraudulent practice of holding rallies at electoral times under official infrastructure inauguration coverage. CHIEF iut/ll/psh