Araz News via turkishny: Justice and Development (AK) Party secures 40.80 percent of vote but fails to gain parliamentary majority.

Turkey’s Justice and Development (AK) Party won its fourth consecutive general election Sunday but failed to gain the majority needed to form a government.

The party, which came to power in 2002 before winning elections in 2007 and 2011, secured 40.80 percent of the vote with 99.89 percent of ballots counted, giving the party 258 seats in the Grand National Assembly – 18 short of a simple majority.

The pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) passed the 10 percent threshold with 13 percent of the vote to take 79 seats – the first time it will enter parliament as a party.

The second-placed Republican People’s Party (CHP) secured 25.05 percent of vote to take 132 seats while the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) gained 16.36 percent to gain 81 seats.

The turnout was 86.49 percent.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is expected to ask the AK Party, as the party that received the highest number of votes, to form a coalition government within 45 days. The government will then submit its program to the assembly within a week, where it will be subject to a vote of confidence.

If parliament does not support the new government, the president can call for a fresh election.

More than 53.7 million Turks were eligible to vote in polls to elect 550 deputies to the Grand National Assembly on Sunday.

Since 2002, the AK Party has won four general and three local elections, as well as two referenda. Erdogan, one of the party’s founders and former prime minister, won the presidential election in August last year.

The party has overseen an economic boost that almost tripled national income, introduced social reform and initiated the “solution process to seek an end to the Kurdish conflict while weathering criticism over corruption claims in the upper reaches of the party.

Reprinted from turkishny