Turkey Rebukes Erdogan !!!!Voters Deny His AK Party a Majority in Parliament.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/turkey-rebukes-erdogan-1433716269
So the man who would be the next Ottoman sultan will have a harder road than he imagined. That’s the big news from Sunday’s parliamentary elections in Turkey, where voters denied President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP, a majority for the first time in 13 years.
Mr. Erdogan had hoped to get 330 seats to be able to call a referendum to change the constitution to give himself more powers as chief executive. But preliminary results as we went to press suggested that the AKP would win about 41% of the vote, or some 258 seats, well short of the 276 for a majority.
This is good news for the political life of Turkey because it shows an electorate alert to stop what has been Mr. Erdogan’s creeping authoritarianism. As Prime Minister from 2003-2014, he harassed opponents in business, the media, the military and even the courts. If he were able to coalesce more power into a dominant Presidency, he could rule like a Vladimir Putin with Islamist characteristics.
A trio of opposition parties ran against AKP, and it isn’t clear whether they can form a coalition government. They include the Kurdish HDP, which is left-leaning on economics and appears to have won enough votes to sit in parliament for the first time. The AKP may also try to form a coalition government. Mr. Erdogan can help by accepting defeat graciously, though this is not his character. Turkish democracy has trials ahead, but at least on Sunday the voters rejected one-man, one-party Islamist rule.
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