Turkey set for crucial November 1 snap election
People in Turkey are set to go to the polls on Sunday, November 1, in a snap election which is hoped to end months of tensions in the country.
Political parties staged their final rallies on Saturday on the eve of the vote, while many are waiting to see whether the Justice and Development Party (AKP), founded by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, would be able to garner enough votes to govern alone.
Polls open in the east of Turkey at 7:00 a.m. local time (0400 GMT) and an hour later in the west, as 54 million Turks are registered to vote.
Voters last went to the polls in June but no party managed to win enough seats to form a government, which in August forced Erdogan to call fresh election after coalition talks did not yield any results.
Opinion polls have shown that the new election is very likely to repeat the shock of the June vote, which ended the AKP’s majority after 13 years of single-party rule.
The AKP is anticipated to receive between 40 and 43 percent of the vote, which means it either has to form a shaky coalition that may not last long or the country should hold another election.
Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has described the vote a “referendum on Turkey's future.”
“Turkey needs a strong and shrewd government at such a critical time,” Davutoglu stated.
Security has been tightened in Turkey as about 385,000 police and gendarmes are set to be deployed on the streets across the country.
Blasts and elections
Since the June election, two fatal bomb blasts have rocked Turkey, including one in the capital, Ankara, on October 10, which killed more than 100 people. The Daesh Takfiri terrorist group has been blamed, while government opponents believe that the administration’s security and intelligence failure led to the fatal blasts.
The other bombing was carried out in the Kurdish town of Suruc, near the border with Syria, in July.
The Sunday election comes at a time when Turkish economy is not in a good condition. Turkey’s economic growth has slowed drastically from the heights of five years ago and the Turkish lira has plummeted about 26 percent in 2015.
People are waiting to see how successful the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) would be in the Sunday vote after it made headline in June when it became the first pro-Kurdish movement in parliament and got enough seats to block an AKP majority.
However, the HDP has been accused of siding with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militant group, which has been fighting for an autonomous Kurdish region inside Turkey since the 1980s.
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