The Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has been ruling Turkey as a single-party government since 2002, would have had a nationwide vote of around 26.3 percent if a general election were to have been held in May, according to a public opinion survey conducted by İstanbul Economy Research.
The survey results also showed that the AKP’s far-right ally the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) would have received only 6 percent in a May election, which is below Turkey’s election threshold.
Turkey has a 10 percent election threshold, which means a party needs to receive at least 10 percent of the national vote in a general election for the opportunity to be represented in parliament.
According to the poll, the AKP, which is back on a downward trend after a brief surge during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, was followed by the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) at 18.2 percent and the nationalist opposition Good (İYİ) Party at 12.5 percent.
The pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) stood at 9.6 percent, while former AKP co-founder Ali Babacan’s DEVA has seen its votes reach 2.2 percent and the Future Party (GP) –- another political movement that broke away from the AKP and was founded by former prime minister Ahmet Davutoğlu -– received 0.9 percent of the vote.
When undecided voters, who represented 14.1 percent, are distributed among the political parties, the AKP vote rises to 33.9 percent, while the MHP vote increases to 8.6 percent, which is still below the election threshold. Distribution of the undecided voters would bring the CHP vote to 22.5 percent, the İYİ vote to 15.8 percent and the HDP vote to 11.9 percent.
The AKP-MHP alliance garnered 53.6 percent of the vote in the 2018 general elections, while Turkish president and AKP chair Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was reelected with 52.4 percent of the vote.
According to a recent poll conducted by the Eurasia Public Research Center (AKAM), only 29.7 percent of respondents said they would definitely vote for Erdoğan in a re-election run, while 48.5 percent said they would definitely not.
The results also show that the popular opposition mayors of İstanbul and Ankara, Ekrem İmamoğlu and Mansur Yavaş, respectively, are both polling ahead of Erdoğan in a potential presidential race against him.