page_title: 2003 Siirt Province by-election
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: 2003 Siirt Province by-election / Background
caption_attribution_description: Türkçe: Siirt Pervari genel görünüş
context_page_description: The 2003 by-election in the Province of Siirt was held on 9 March 2003 in order to elect three Members of Parliament from the eastern Turkish province of Siirt to the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. The by-election was held four months after the 2002 general election in November, which the Supreme Electoral Council of Turkey declared null and void in Siirt due to voting irregularities in the district of Pervari. The council decided on 2 December 2002 that the complaints by the local electoral authorities had influenced on the election result, thus calling a by-election.
  The by-election remains a significant event in Turkish politics, since it allowed Justice and Development Party leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to run for parliament. Despite having won the 2002 general election with nearly a two-thirds supermajority, Erdoğan had been barred from running for office due to a previous conviction for inciting religious intolerance in 1998. The AKP government, led by the party's co-founder Prime Minister Abdullah Gül, annulled Erdoğan's political ban and thus allowed him to run in the by-election.
context_section_description: The Province of Siirt is a province in the south-east Anatolia region of Turkey with a predominantly Kurdish population. With an electorate in 2003 of approximately 119,198, it elects three of the 550 MPs to the Grand National Assembly. In the 2002 general election, the province was won by the Kurdish nationalist Democratic People's Party (DHP), which gained 32.17% of the votes. Since the party polled below 10% nationally, it was unable to win any parliamentary seats. According to the Turkish electoral system, the DHP's votes were allocated to the winning party of the election, namely the Justice and Development Party (AKP), which had come second with 17.56% of the vote. Turkish businessman Fadıl Akgündüz was elected as an independent with 13.65% of the votes, coming third. The CHP came fifth with 8.92% of the vote, but won the province's final MP since it was the only other political party apart from the AKP to poll above 10% nationwide.
  In the 2002 general election, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's AKP won 363 seats in Parliament and formed the first single-party government since 1987. While serving as Mayor of Istanbul in 1998, he had been convicted of reciting a poem which incited religious intolerance in Siirt and sentenced to 10 months in prison. After serving four months, Erdoğan founded the AKP in 2001 as a moderately Islamist political party, capitalising on voter dissatisfaction with the existing political parties and their poor economic records. His imprisonment forced him to give up the mayoralty and resulted in a political ban. Despite being the AKP leader, Erdoğan was unable to seek parliamentary election in 2002 and thus the party's co-founder Abdullah Gül became Prime Minister instead. With the help of the opposition CHP, Gül pushed forward constitutional reforms which nullified Erdoğan's political ban and allowed him to run for office.
caption: The Pervari district of Siirt, where alleged irregularities occurred
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