How was Turkey’s ruling party able to pull ahead in the elections?

HARI SREENIVASAN:

Turkey's ruling party appears to have regained control of Parliament.

In national elections today, the Justice and Development Party, known as AKP, won slightly less than 50 percent of the vote, thought to be enough either to win a majority of seats or to control a governing coalition.

The results are a boost for Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, although he wasn't on the ballot. His party had lost its parliamentary majority in June.

The victory could strengthen Erdogan's hand in cracking down on Kurdish separatists and in cooperating with NATO allies, including the United States, in fighting Islamic State, or ISIS, militants in neighboring Syria and Iraq.

"NewsHour" special correspondent Malcolm Brabant is in Turkey covering the elections. He joins me now via Skype from Istanbul.

Malcolm, everyone got this wrong in their predictions heading into the election. What happened?

MALCOLM BRABANT:

Well, there has been some consistency actually in lots of elections around the world, where — whereby the pollsters have got it wrong. And it seems that Turkey, in that respect, is no different from other places where the pollsters have got it wrong.

Perhaps people have been telling fibs to the pollsters because they want to trick them. But what seems to have happened is that the Turks seem to have taken a decision that they wanted to vote for stability and also for security.

And what seems to have happened is that Mr. Erdogan's gamble of holding second elections in the space of five months has worked. And the reasons for that seem to be, as I say, because the Turks crave stability. There are also those terrorist bombs some time ago.

And that's led people to go rushing perhaps back to Mr. Erdogan's AK Party. There was one analyst on television a short time ago. He was saying that, during the June elections, the AK Party's supporters deserted it because they were disillusioned with Mr. Erdogan, and they — but they abstained. But, this time, they have come rushing back.

The other thing that does seem to have happened is that there was disunity amongst the opposition parties. And people seem to have been punishing them for not having the ability to come up with an alternative to Mr. Erdogan's party.

So, that appears to be the reason why he's won. And, tonight, the prime minister was saying that, although this is a fairly substantial and unexpected victory, he appealed for the AK Party supporters to have humility in this victory and not to be arrogant about it.

HARI SREENIVASAN:

Well, besides the security question that you mentioned already, what about the refugees that are landing on Turkey's door? I mean, they have two million refugees from Syria along their borders, practically entire cities of refugee camps now.

MALCOLM BRABANT:

Well, this is really a sort of major problem for Turkey, but also for Europe.

But what this election victory does, really, in a way, is that it strengthens Mr. Erdogan's hand when it comes to dealing with Europe, because now they know who they're dealing with. And so there are some people in Europe, for example, who think that Mr. Erdogan and his parties here have been blackmailing Europe into trying to get more money out of them in order to support these refugees.

But now at least Europe knows that — who it's dealing with, in that there is some sort of government here. And so perhaps some sort of arrangement can now be worked out.

HARI SREENIVASAN:

Well, were there any sort of exit questionnaires or polls taken on what influenced people when they went into the polls today?

MALCOLM BRABANT:

That sort of evidence has not really come out on Turkish television.

And there are — there are some people here who are rather unhappy about the result. I mean, there are people on the left of Turkish society and also people in the Kurdish areas down in the southeast who are very sort of perturbed about the level of victory that Mr. Erdogan seems to have achieved.

They seem to be sort of suggesting that there might have been some kind of dirty tricks. But I have spoken to the international observers organization which is here, the Organization for Security in Europe, and they seem to be pretty happy about the way in which the — the election was carried out, in complete fairness.

But there are a couple of things that are a little bit strange here. For example, the official state organization which counts the polls closed down its sort of counting system today. And that sort of really puzzled even the most experienced political analysts. They don't understand really why — why that has happened.

And so there are lots of people who are angry tonight. There have been minor sort of disturbances in Diyarbakir, which is the center of the Kurdish region down in the southeast. People from the — who support the Kurdish party, the HDP, which did so well in the June election, are disappointed that their numbers have dropped.

But there are some people who think that the reason they didn't do so well this time was because they are forced into a position of supporting, in a way, the Kurdish nationalists, the PKK, after the government started attacking them.

So, whereas before that they had kind of a pan-Turkish appeal in — towards people who were disenchanted with the government and perhaps feeling a little bit disenfranchised, some of those folks have gone back to more traditional opposition parties. But, certainly, the opposition parties have been hammered tonight.

HARI SREENIVASAN:

All right, Malcolm Brabant, special correspondent for the "NewsHour," joining us via Skype from Istanbul tonight, thanks so much.

MALCOLM BRABANT:

You're welcome.