Turkish authorities have announced the final results of the nation's general elections, confirming the ruling party's victory.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development Party, or AKP, took 341 of the 550 seats, down from 351 in the outgoing parliament, electoral board director Muammer Aydin said on Monday.
Aydin also confirmed that the AKP, which is associated with Turkey's Islamist movement, got 46.6 percent of the votes, almost 12 percentage points more than in the previous elections.
The main opposition Republican People's Party won 112 seats. The far-right Nationalist Action Party returned to the parliament with 70 seats, after a five-year absence, Aydin said.
Nationalist Action would have been represented by 71 legislators, but one of its newly elected lawmakers was killed in a car crash on Thursday and his seat will remain empty.
The election results confirmed that 26 independents, including 22 pro-Kurdish lawmakers, won seats.
The pro-Kurdish lawmakers ran in the election as independents to circumvent a 10 percent vote threshold required to win representation in parliament.
They regrouped on Sunday under the banner of the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party, which seeks more rights for the ethnic minority.
Officials from the party petitioned on Monday to have the party registered in the parliament.
The parliament was scheduled to be sworn in on Saturday. Once the new government is formed, parliament must choose a new president
The Nationalist Action Party has already pledged to help the government achieve the quorum needed to elect a president. In May, parliament failed to reach a quorum in a similar vote.
Erdogan had nominated Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, one of his closest allies, for the presidency in April, sparking a backlash from the firmly secular opposition.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS