ISTANBUL, Turkey – Changes to Turkey’s electoral system proposed by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan will favor the Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), analysts say, but the party itself says that is not true.
Erdogan announced a “democratization package” last month which includes a proposal to lower the threshold for a political party to enter parliament to 5 percent of the national vote, instead of the current 10 percent which is among the highest in the world. The higher threshold has kept Kurdish groupings out of parliament.
Dr Seyfettin Gursel,a prominent academic known for his extensive work on electoral system reform in Turkey, said that with the lower threshold the BDP can look to occupy more than 30 seats in parliament.
“My simulation model foresees 32-33 seats for the BDP at 6 percent of the vote,” he told Rudaw.
“Moreover, the threshold for party financing from the public budget will be lowered from 7 percent to 3 percent which will allow the BDP to receive financial aid like other parties,”Gursel added.
Erdogan put forward three proposals while announcing the democracy package: Keep the current electoral system with the 10 percent threshold; lower the threshold to 5 percent along with narrowing electoral constituencies to five seats; or remove the threshold altogether and establish single seat constituencies.
The proposed changes have sparked heated debates among Turkey’s political parties, with the BDP among the fiercest critics of the whole democracy package.
“We have to discuss the new system in detail. Yet, nobody asked our opinion,” complained Ertugrul Kurkcu, the BDP’s outspoken deputy for Mersin.
“The aim of the two new proposals is to confine the BDP to the southeast and prevent its participation in Turkish politics as an active actor,” Kurkcu said. “But we don’t want to be the spokesman of only the Kurdish people. We want to defend the rights of all the unprivileged and oppressed,” he added.
“For the BDP this is a retreat to only one region (of the country) by abandoning all its other rights to the central government. In this context the argument that both of the proposals would be beneficial to BDP is not right,” Kurkcu argued.
He accused the AKP of aiming only to enhance its own strength, and “opening the way for a presidential system” without a referendum.
Mehmet Ozcan, director of the independent Ankara Strategy Institute, believes that the BDP knows it will benefit under the proposals, but does not want to admit it. He said that two of the proposals would be highly beneficial to the BDP in the short run.
