Electoral system of Turkey

Turkey has been a multi-party democracy since 1950 (officially since 1945), with the first democratic election held on 14 May 1950 leading to the end of the single-party rule established in 1923.

The parliamentary threshold, which stayed as high as 10% between 1982 and 2022, has been subject to intense scrutiny by opposition members, since all votes cast for parties polling under 10% are spoilt and allow the parties overcoming the national threshold to win more seats than correspond to their share of votes.

While initially the D'Hondt method was applied proportionally to all alliance members, a bill overseeing alterations to the election law passed on 31 March 2022 changed the system so that each party that passes the new 7% threshold either by itself or by being a member of an electoral alliance are directly represented by its own votes in each constituency when the calculations of D'Hondt are being made, disallowing smaller members of an electoral alliance from gaining MPs in the strongholds of their larger allies' strongholds due to their overall percentage contribution to the alliance.

[1] The main criticism of the current system has long been the unusually high 10% threshold necessary to gain seats.

In January 2015, the CHP renewed their parliamentary proposals to lower the threshold to 3% and proposed no changes to the proportional representation system, though the AK Party has been against lowering the threshold without wider electoral reform.

[4] Under these proposals, the threshold would fall from 10% to either 7 or 8% while Turkey would be split into 129 electoral districts rather than the existing 85.

The two main opposition parties CHP and MHP do not have a substantial number of electoral strongholds, meaning that they would be negatively impacted by a narrow-district system.

[4] Proposals by the AK Party to create a full first-past-the-post system with 550 single-member constituencies were allegedly unveiled in December 2014, though any change in electoral law would have to be passed by parliament at least a year before the election.

In all but four cases, electoral districts share the same name and borders of the 81 Provinces of Turkey.

Yusuf Halaçoğlu's bill which would partly mitigate this disparity was rejected in the parliament.

Before the elections, the numbers of councillors and mayors were reduced during the 2013 Turkish local government reorganisation.