Who did the Turkish diaspora vote for?
Overseas voting first took place in the presidential election last year, but there were too many problems. Therefore, Turks living abroad played a role in the fate of this country for the first time in the recent June 7 general election.
Some 2.87 million Turkish citizens were registered to vote in all four corners of the world. This is a big and serious number. In the June 7 election, 1.41 million valid votes were cast.
According to the Supreme Election Board (YSK), the Justice and Development Party (AKP) got the lion’s share of votes abroad with 44.4 percent, followed by the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) with 18.9 percent, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) with 14.04 percent, and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) with 8 percent.
As you know, the AKP won 258 parliamentary seats overall. Each AKP deputy was elected with an average of 73,129 votes, including votes cast within Turkey, votes cast abroad, and votes cast at customs gates.
According to the figures, votes cast abroad contributed 6 parliamentary seats to the AKP’s total.
If you make the same calculation for the CHP, which won 132 seats, this party got 87,258 votes for each of its deputies. So voters abroad brought the CHP 1.6 parliamentarians.
The HDP needed 75,731 votes for each of its 80 deputies, which means that voters abroad brought the HDP 2.4 deputies.
The MHP needed 94,000 thousand votes for each of its 80 deputies. Therefore, the MHP got one parliamentarian thanks to votes from abroad.
Obviously, this is quite a rough calculation. There are all kinds of peculiarities with the D’Hondt system that we have in Turkey. The system varies from region to region.
The HDP, for instance, needed 66,000 votes for the 10 deputies it gained in Diyarbakır. However, each of its three elected deputies needed to receive 110,000 votes to be elected from Istanbul’s first district.
In other words, all votes are not equal and the value of votes can change from one electoral region to another.
We know that the MHP lost a deputy in Kocaeli to the HDP due to votes cast abroad. Again, in Amasya, the MHP lost a deputy to the AKP due to votes cast abroad. In İzmir, the CHP lost an MP to the AKP for a similar reason.
The parties that lost deputies overall, (the CHP and the MHP), are the ones that did not do very well abroad.
The HDP came first in Japan and Thailand, the CHP in Qatar and Kuwait
Meanwhile, the YSK has prepared something very nice. On its website you can view the votes cast country by country, even at the level of individual ballot boxes.
I went through some of the countries that I thought could be interesting.
For instance, in Germany the AKP was uncontestably the top party, with 255,000 more votes than the nearest challenger.
In the U.S., the CHP ranked first with 7,800 votes and the HDP was second with 4,256 votes.
The winner in Albania was the MHP with 146 votes. The AKP came first in Australia with 3,120 votes and the HDP came second with 1,375 votes.
There is a clear CHP dominance in the Gulf countries. The CHP came first with 1,016 votes in United Arab Emirates, with 365 votes in Qatar, and 219 votes in Kuwait.
The HDP had the upper hand in the United Kingdom with 14,126, followed by the CHP with 5,134 votes. The HDP also ranked first in Japan (381 votes) and Thailand (77 votes). In Greece, the HDP and the CHP both got 174 votes, leaving the AKP and the MHP behind. The CHP ranked first in Israel (104 votes), while the HDP got 54 votes. In Kazakhstan, the CHP ranked first with 309 votes while the HDP got 271 votes.
