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Turkey election: Protests turn violent in Diyarbakir

With nearly two thirds of the votes counted, the AKP had taken 51.9 per cent of the vote, TRT said.

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Ziya Pir, who was reelected, said the party had suffered from the rise in violence since the AKP ended peace talks with the PKK guerrilla movement.

A senior official from opposition party CHP said the results was “simply a disaster”.

Following the victory, the president issued a statement saying: “The election results show that our nation has sided with looking after the environment of stability and trust that was risked on June 7”.

Since June’s poll, a ceasefire with Kurdish militants has collapsed, the war in neighbouring Syria has worsened and Turkey – a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation member state – has been buffeted by two Islamic State-linked suicide bomb attacks that killed more than 130 people.

“The national will manifested itself on November 1 in favor of stability”, Erdogan said in comments to reporters after praying at a mosque in Istanbul.

The outcome was a shock to many as opinion polls had predicted a replay of the June election when the AKP won only 40 per cent of the vote and lost its majority for the first time in 13 years. The publication also said that with decisive vote, “Turkey’s strongman president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, tightened his grip on power decisively”.

“Today is a victory for our democracy and our people”, he told a crowd of supporters in the province of Konya in central Turkey.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu spared no time in capitalizing on his party’s stunning parliamentary election win Monday and called for redrafting the constitution to transform governance to a presidential system.

With most of the results counted, the AKP won substantially more than the 276 seats needed to get a majority, allowing it to form a government on its own.

Clashes broke out in Diyarbakir, a mainly Kurdish city in Turkey’s southeast, with people setting fire to rubbish bins and throwing stones at police, following news of the partial results.

But the four political parties that made their way to the parliament failed to produce a coalition government, and snap elections were called. But tensions with Turkey’s large Kurdish minority have escalated as the deaths of Kurdish rebels fighting the government have mounted.

The Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) lost almost a million votes since the June general election, according to the initial results of Sunday’s election rerun. We were not able to lead an election campaign. “It’s in our people’s power to change our future, to have a stronger democracy”, said charismatic HDP leader Selahattin Demirtas after he voted. “My wish is that a great hope for peace and calm emerges (from the vote)”.

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Earlier despite the HDP’s poor perfomance a few “supporters ” öhttp://www.thestar.com.my/News/World/2015/11/02/Tight-security-strong-turnout-in-Turkeys-battlescarred-Kurdish-southeast/ did come out and celebrated hoping that stalled peace stalks between Kurdish militants and the government would resume. Erdogan has lashed out at the party, calling it the political arm of the Kurdistan Workers Party, which Turkey and most Western countries consider a terrorist organization.

Early results show Turkey's AKP leads vote