Poll shows Turkey’s AK party on track for 3rd term

The AK Party of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan is on course to win a third consecutive term when Turkey votes in a parliamentary election in June, according to an opinion poll published on Monday.
The survey conducted on April 3-5 by polling company Metropoll, and published in the pro-government Sabah newspaper, showed AK winning between 47 and 50% of the vote, slightly above the 46.6% it scored in the 2007 election.
The Metropoll findings point towards a more decisive win for the AK than the 46.4% support another pollster, Konsensus, had indicated in a survey published in Haberturk newspaper on March 21.
The polls take into account a feature of the Turkish electoral system whereby ballots cast for parties that score less than 10% of the vote are redistributed among the leading parties. The 10% threshold is meant to reduce the chance of unstable coalition governments.
Investors would be reassured by a AK victory in the June 12 election, as the party has overseen a period of unprecedented prosperity since inheriting a struggling economy after a financial crisis in 2000-2001.
Critics, however, remain suspicious about the Islamist roots of AK leaders, including Erdogan, though the party has cast itself to conform with Turkey's secular constitution and is sometimes compared with Europe's Christian Democrat parties.
The poll of 1,517 voters in 31 provinces showed support for the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) at 27 to 30%, while backing for the conservative Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) was 12-14%.
The main Kurdish group, the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) is seen getting 5.4% of the votes, far below the 10% threshold for entering parliament. But the BDP's strategy has been to bypass the threshold law by fielding candidates as independents so that they can take their seats.
Erdogan has pledged to introduce a new constitution if he wins the election, in order to completely replace one written in the aftermath of a military coup in 1980.