People waiting for the HDP leader to arrive,May, 2015. Wikicommons/Julia Buzaud. Some rights reserved..Turkey's general elections on 7 June marked the downfall of Erdoğan’s authoritarian rule. Encroaching on the limitations of his role as stipulated in the Turkish Constitution, which denies the president power to act on behalf of a political party, Erdoğan turned the elections into a confidence vote on his desire to change the Turkish parliamentarian system into a presidential one. This would have meant the extreme concentration of the executive power in the hands of the president. To achieve it, the AKP (Justice and Development Party) had to win an absolute majority of the vote, since the major competing parties – the CHP (Republican People’s Party), MHP (Nationalist Movement Party), and HDP (People’s Democratic Party) – strongly opposed the suggested constitutional amendment.
The public response to Erdoğan’s political egoism was a rally to democracy, voting to allow the formation of a new representative 550-member provisional parliament, comprising 98 female MPs (a record), as well as 80 Kurds, three Armenians, one Yazidi, and one Roma.
Most discussions have focused on the factors that have led to the AKP and Erdoğan’s unpopularity. This is largely seen as a direct response to Erdoğan’s increasingly authoritarian ambitions, corruption scandals, the economic downturn, the mishandling of the Gezi Park protests and Kobane incidents, and the withdrawal of support by significant numbers of the Gülen movement, which led to a shift by many AKP voters to the MHP or HDP.
