2023 Turkish parliamentary election

At the initiative of the ruling AKP and its main political ally MHP, the national electoral threshold for a party to enter parliament was lowered from 10 to 7 percent.[2] This was the first lowering of the threshold since it was introduced by the military junta following the 1980 Turkish coup d'état.[3]

There is no threshold for independent candidates.[4] Political parties can also opt to contest the election in a political alliance with other parties, removing the 7% requirement as long as the alliance as a whole wins more than 7% of the vote in total.

Other amendments to the election law includes the distribution of seats. Previously, parliamentary seats were distributed based on the vote share of each election alliance in any given district. Now, the seats are distributed based solely on the vote share of each political party in that district. If applied to the previous elections, the results would have been slightly more in line with the preferences of the voters. For example, one Erzurum seat from IYI (4th largest party in Erzurum) would have gone to HDP (3rd largest party in Erzurum) and one Elâzığ seat from CHP (3rd largest party in Elâzığ) to MHP (2nd largest party in Elâzığ).[5]

Turkey is split into 87 electoral districts, which elect a certain number of Members to the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. The Assembly has a total of 550 seats, which each electoral district allocated a certain number of MPs in proportion to their population. The Supreme Electoral Council of Turkey conducts population reviews of each district before the election and can increase or decrease a district's number of seats according to their electorate.

In all but four cases, electoral districts share the same name and borders of the 81 Provinces of Turkey, with the exception of Ankara, Bursa, Izmir and Istanbul. Provinces electing between 19 and 36 MPs are split into two electoral districts, while any province electing above 36 MPs are divided into three. As the country's most populous provinces, Bursa and Izmir are divided into two subdistricts while Ankara and Istanbul is divided into three. The distribution of elected MPs per electoral district is shown below.[6]