Turkey's ruling party leads vote

ISTANBUL,Turkey-Turkey's ruling AK Party won 48.1 percent of the vote in a landslide national election victory on Sunday after two thirds of votes had been counted,private broadcaster CNN Turk said.Two other parties crossed Turkey's high national threshold of 10 percent to enter parliament, with the leftist CHP winning 19.4 percent and the ultra-nationalist MHP on 14.7 percent, the broadcaster quoted partial returns as showing.A senior official for the pro-business center-right AK Party declared victory,saying it would win enough seats to form a single-party government for a second five-year term.Polls closed an hour earlier in eastern Turkey where the Republican People's Party(CHP)and far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP)are relatively weak,so the early figures might not be entirely representative of the final results.Electoral commission officials estimated turnout at around 80 percent in a country of 74 million people where voting is compulsory.If both the CHP and MHP clear Turkey's 10 percent hurdle to enter parliament, as the figures indicated, it was unclear whether the AKP would end up with a bigger majority of seats, despite winning some 15 percentage points more than in 2002.
To read more go to:
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/europe/07/22/turkey.elections.reut/index.html
As in the days of Noah...