Turkey: Preliminary Results Show AK Party Leads Parliament Elections

New York – Preliminary results of the general election for Turkey’s Parliament show the country’s ruling AK Party leading the vote, according to a count by state-run TRT television on Sunday.

With 95 percent of the votes counted, the AKP was at 49.5 percent of the votes, followed by its main opposition CHP at 25.2 percent, TRT revealed.

A Parliament win by the AK Party means the recovery of a single-party government maintained since 2002, disrupted by the AKP’s electoral loss of overall majority last June.

Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan could be on his way to regaining stability of a country in the midst of major economic issues, the Kurdish insurrection and internal bloodshed bombings that killed over 130 people.

“It is obvious in today’s election how beneficial stability is for our nation and today our citizens will make their choice based on this,” President Erdogan told the press after voting in Istanbul.

Senior AKP officials emphasized their joy for the results, since the party had only expected to garner 45-46 percent of the votes to form a single-party government.

“This is a success exceeding our expectations,” an AKP official said, according to Reuters.

“Turkey lost considerable ground in economy, politics and terror during this period, and gains were lost. Voters appeared to want to bring back stability once again,” another AKP official stressed.

Expressing the country’s need for peace and freedom, leader of the pro-Kurdish HDP Selahattin Demirtas whose party stepped back from the campaign election, said after voting on Sunday, “What all Turkey wants and needs more than anything is peace and calm.”

The AKP could have a challenging time with a deeply polarized Turkey, which citizens are divided between the return of single-party rule seen by some as authoritarianism, or the formation of coalition.