MHP complains about 10 percent electoral threshold

ANKARA

The current 10 percent electoral threshold in Turkey is too high and needs to be lowered, Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahçeli has urged, stressing that the quota required to get into parliament should be decided through a consensus between political parties.

“The MHP is not worried about the 10 percent threshold. But the possibility of staying below the threshold puts pressure on the society. There are people who think this is better [for Turkey]. But 10 percent is too high for Turkey,” Bahçeli told a group of reporters on Nov. 7.

Saying that the threshold was introduced in the wake of the 1980 military coup in a bid to prevent “separatist” and “marginal” parties from entering parliament, Bahçeli noted that this could instead be prevented with alliances between different political parties.

“That is how the 10 percent threshold could be overcome,” Bahçeli said.

“We need to pay attention to two things: Leaving impositions behind, we now have to work on reaching a consensus on how we could launch a process for stability and normalization, and how we can live altogether in a democracy,” he said.

“We have to see where the threshold could be set, at five, six or seven percent, or whether it would remain at 10 percent. While doing this, we should not ignore certain political parties because that did not work. We should take lessons from all these,” he stressed.

The MHP leader’s comments come amid the results of opinion polls which predict the MHP could stay under the threshold because of the Good Party (İyi Parti), established recently by former lawmakers of the MHP.

But Bahçeli refuted the results, saying that in the past polling companies had speculated that his party would fail to enter parliament with only two to eight percent of the votes.

MHP against snap elections

Meanwhile, Bahçeli said his party did not support the main opposition Republican People’s Party’s (CHP) call for early elections, adding that it would only weaken the ongoing fight against terror.

“The CHP never was as ambitious in the past elections. It is perhaps receiving big support from some places, which is why it suddenly has this courage. If this courage is based on the ‘justice march,’ then there is no problem with that. But if it is from other places, we should think about it,” he said, implying that the CHP was receiving support from third parties.