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Comment by hereforphone | Hacker News Reader

One big concern is that Erdoğan will likely hold on to power however he can. He's already circumvented the constitution (and changed electoral law). I believe he will fight to maintain his reign if necessary. He has about 50% of the country behind him, and as far as I can tell the allegiance is based on religious principles, which makes it a strong allegiance indeed.

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Donald Trump only won 46.1% of the vote in 2016 and that was enough. In fact no one got over 50%. Hillary Clinton had a plurality with 48.2%

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia...

In England David Cameron had a parliamentary majority with only 38% of the vote.

That's actual voters of course, a subset of how many people support a candidate or President in the US. The parent has no idea how many people support Erdogan (the claimed 50%), nobody does. It's just a guess in the wind (if it's 42% that's a massive difference from 54%, as to whether Erdogan remains standing). Like trying to guess how many Russians really support Putin's dictatorship. Getting honest answers on such questions is quite difficult, as is accurately polling in nations the size and complexity of eg the US, Russia or Turkey.

In England in 2015, Cameron had 40.9% apparently (https://www.statista.com/statistics/717022/general-elections...). The point still stands—he had far more than 40.9% of English seats!

On the other hand, the Turkish electoral system can fail even more bizarrely than a simple single-member constituency FPTP system—in 2002, only the CHP and AKP cleared the 10% threshold, so the AKP had ⅔ of the votes.

However, at the moment, the president is directly elected, so anything <50% wouldn’t suffice. (How those votes are obtained, of course, is another matter.)

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