The Turkish Election

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | New party heads for Turkey victory

Turkey's outgoing Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit has conceded defeat, after early results showed none of the three ruling coalition parties managed to win the 10% share of the vote to get into parliament.

With over 60% of the ballots counted, the recently-founded AK party has more than 34% of the vote.

The latest projections of seats in the new parliament give AK a massive majority - just a few seats short of the two thirds needed to change the constitution.

Now I know I'm a bit of an electoral systems geek - when I was a kid I used to hold mock elections with pets and stuffed toys as candidates. At the age of about 13 I understood how to conduct a count using the Single Transferrable Vote system. But surely any system that gives a party with just over a third of the popular vote the best part of a two-thirds majority in parliament can only be described as 'fundamentally broken'?

Not that the British system is a lot better; I've always been a supporter of electoral reform. We could see something equally strange next time round if the Tories continue their current decline.

I shall leave the implicatitions of the electoral success in Turkey of a supposedly Islamist party to the pundits.