Turkey election 2015: Kurdish Obama is the country's bright new star Read more 
 
 The AKP has dominated Turkish politics since it first came to power in 2002, but has suffered from a dip in economic growth and controversy over Erdoğan’s perceived authoritarian tendencies.  Almost immediately, the results raised questions about the political future of Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who moved to that position from that of foreign minister last year and was seen as a loyal subordinate of Mr. Erdogan. Rounding out the rest of the vote on Sunday, the secular-nationalist Republican People’s Party (CHP) won 25 percent; the right-wing Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) took 17 percent; and the HDP ended up at 12.5 percent. Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 The vote turned on the historic performance at the ballot box of Turkey’s Kurdish minority, which aligned with liberals and secular Turks opposed to Mr. Erdogan’s leadership to win almost 13 percent of the vote, passing the legal threshold for earning representation in Parliament. “I believe the results, which do not give the opportunity to any party to form a single-party government, will be assessed healthily and realistically by every party.” 
 
 Turkey election results: what you need to know Read more 
 
 The election breakthrough for the leftist HDP, a new party largely representing the Kurds but also encompassing liberals nationally, was greeted with wild celebrations in the Kurdish-majority city of Diyarbakir in south-eastern Turkey. Erdoğan to struggle on despite thumbs down from Turkey's electorate Read more 
 
 Selahattin Demirtas, co-chair of the leftist HDP, and surprise star of this election, also dismissed any possibility of a coalition with the AKP. According to the state-run Anadolu agency, the party leader, Devlet Bahceli, said the party was “ready to be a main opposition party” against an AKP-led coalition or minority government during a speech from party headquarters in Ankara early on Monday. “I am so full of joy that I can’t speak properly.” 
 
 “It is a carnival night,” said 47-year-old Huseyin Durmaz, a Kurd. Photo 
 
 The diminished power of Mr. Erdogan’s party is likely to rein in Turkey’s ambitions to shape events in the Middle East, an activist foreign policy that has been controversial among political opponents and the public.
– "This is a nuclear explosion" is how an expert on Turkey puts it to the Washington Post. The country's ruling party today finds itself with few options to form a new government after it was stripped of its parliamentary majority and opposition parties ruled out joining it in a coalition pact. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's AKP party won about 41% of the votes yesterday and was projected to take 258 seats—18 below the minimum required to rule alone and ending its 13-year single-party rule. As the New York Times reports, after more than a decade as PM, Erdogan was last year elected to the somewhat "ceremonial post" of president, and the result was a stunning rebuke to Erdogan's ambitions to expand his powers; his hopes of passing constitutional changes that would fashion more of an executive presidency, more akin to our own version, are on hold, reports the Atlantic. Turkey has 45 days in which to form a new government after final official results are confirmed, but all three opposition parties have come out against a coalition with the AKP. Turkey's main opposition party, CHP, suggested it should be given the task of forming a government. The liberal pro-Kurdish HDP party dealt the AKP its biggest setback by clearing for the first time the 10% threshold it needed to grab seats in parliament (it'll take about 80 of the chamber's 550). The Guardian frames the significance: "The results will give the Kurds—who, with 20% of Turkey's population, are the country's biggest minority—true representation in parliament. ... The 10% hurdle, dating from the military-authored constitution of 1980, had been intended in part to diminish Kurdish representation in the parliament."