Why the HDP must remain in Parliament

Peoples? Democratic Party (HDP) Co-Head Selahattin Demirtas says his party will have no problems in passing the nationwide 10 percent electoral threshold in the June elections. His fervent calls for the threshold to be reduced, however, reveal a concern that if this does not happen his party may not be able to be a part of Parliament after the elections.

The HDP is preparing to contest these elections as a party this time around, unlike the last time when pro-Kurdish politicians ran mostly as independent candidates in order not to get caught in the threshold net had they ran as a party.

The 10 percent threshold was introduced in the 1990s to keep Islamist and Kurdish parties out of Parliament. The Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) overcame that hurdle with its landslide victory in 2002, even though it had criticized the 10 percent threshold as undemocratic.

This threshold has not been an obstacle for it since and therefore the AKP has no qualms about maintaining it for obvious reasons. The votes of any party that remains under the nationwide threshold, even if it may have won significantly in certain districts, goes to the winner in that district.
Put in simple language, if the HDP cannot pass this threshold in June, its votes will go to the AKP. Given this stark fact it is unlikely that the AKP will move to lower the threshold.

The Constitutional Court is to rule soon on the admissibility of individual applications made to it to have the threshold reduced to EU levels. The Court is, however, not expected to accept these applications since the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that a 10 percent threshold, while not in line with European standards of democracy, is not a violation of the European...