BY SEDAT ERGIN
HURRIYET- Columnist Sedat Ergin writes on Turkey’s system of requiring a party to win a minimum of 10% of the votes in an election for it to be represented in Parliament. A summary of his column is as follows:
The most important outcome of last week’s focus on the Supreme Board of Elections (YSK) is that it once again highlighted the unfairness of the 10% threshold. Not the rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) but rather its overwhelming majority in Parliament should be questioned.
This is a question of our representative democracy. Due to the 10% threshold, last November approximately 15.8 million votes out of a total of 32.8 million cast were effectively thrown into the wastebasket. This is a wrongheaded and unfair practice which stymies the national will. Although the AKP won just one-third of the total votes, this translated into a two-thirds parliamentary majority. There is a serious lack of proportion between these two numbers.
This situation spotlights a crisis of representation in our Parliament. The threshold constitutes an impediment to the national will, which is why I believe it’s high time that Ankara reconsider our election system. Moreover, the European Union is very likely to put pressure on Ankara to do so as well. We all know that on previous occasions EU circles have conveyed to Ankara their concerns about the threshold. Moreover, the EU Commission is likely to add a sentence to its Turkey Progress Report due out early next month stating that the threshold prevents a significant number of votes from being represented in our Parliament. It’s clear that as we’re trying to join the EU such a high threshold should be abandoned. The highest threshold among the current EU members is Germany’s 5%.
It’s not difficult to see that this discussion will soon rise to the top of Ankara’s agenda. The AKP, which has accepted EU membership as its priority, will have to take concrete steps on this issue. Here lies a dilemma for our government: If the threshold is lowered, the AKP will be forsaking an important advantage which brought it to power single-handedly in the last elections. Therefore, this will be an important test for the credibility of the AKP’s democratization policy.