World Bulletin / News Desk

The world media has responded to the results of the Turkish general election. Below is a rundown of the major outlets and their response.

CNN reported the parliamentary elections were expected to bring about drastic change in Turkey. But few anticipated that the country's early election results would signal the end of the dominance the AKP has enjoyed since it came to power.It noted that 

Having fallen short of that majority, Erdogan's proposal to shift power from the Prime Minister's Office to the president is in doubt now. 

Al Jazeera reported the AK party, which currently has 311 seats in parliament, has ruled the country with a single-majority government for the last 13 years.

It quoted the HDP leader Selattin Demirtas who said "The ones who are authoritarian and arrogant lost, and the ones who are in love with the liberty and peace in Turkey won in the polls,"

"The country has avoided a one-person dictatorship and a civilian coup," he said, adding that his party was the key party to form the new government.

Deniz Ulke Aribogan,a professor of political science from Istanbul Bilgi University, told Al Jazeera. "The election results are a big success for the HDP as it has moved from a Kurdish-oriented party to a party that addresses the whole Turkey. It got votes from liberal voters who previously voted for the AK party and CHP and who wanted to block Erdogan and AK party this time,".

"The results show that Turkish citizens want Erdogan to act in line with his position as a neutral president. They don't want to see him rallying as if he is the leader of the AK party."

The Guardian reported that the vote was the first time in four general elections that support for Erdoğan decreased. The fall coupled with an election triumph for a new pro-Kurdish party lead by the "Kurdish Obama" Selahattin Dermirtas which will force it to negotiate a coalition, probably with extreme nationalists, or to call a fresh election if no parliamentary majority can be secured within six weeks.

“This is a nuclear explosion in Turkish politics,” said Bulent Aliriza, an expert in Turkey at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. 

Germany's Deutsche Welle reported that Turkish voters rebuked Erdogan's ambition saying that his hopes of constitutional change were thwarted..The results represented a significant setback for Mr. Erdogan, who has steadily increased his power since being elected last year as president, a partly but not solely ceremonial post.

Haaretz, the Israeli English daily described Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as "Sultan Erdogan" whose dream turned to a nightmare with the failure of win being a bitter blow to President Erdogan's dreams of ruling forever and that now a new era of potentially unstable coalition government now looms.

The New York Times also made mention the vote was also a significant victory to the cadre of Kurds, liberals and secular Turks who were happy to see Mr. Erdogan’s powers curtailed, even though the prospect of a coalition government evokes dark memories of political instability and economic malaise during the 1990s.

Al-Arabiya also reinterated what other media outlet reported saying that the vote was a sensational result that shakes-up Turkey's political landscape.

The Washington Post also described the elections as the worst result for the AKP since 2002 whilst pointing the finger at the HDP, which came in fourth with 12 percent of the vote describing the passing of the 10% threshold to enter parliament as a "a remarkable achievement" despite the fact that it has direct ties to the violent three-decade Kurdish separatist insurgency in Turkey’s southeast. 

The result likely puts an end, for now, to Erdogan's hopes of passing constitutional changes that would have greatly boosted the powers of his office.