Nationalists and Kurds have won seats in the Turkish parliament for the first time in many years, complicating Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s landslide election victory.

The Prime Minister’s party has enough seats to form a single-party government and will not need to rely on the Nationalists or Kurds to pass most laws. Mr Erdogan will, however, need partners to help him to elect a president – the issue that forced him to call early elections after opponents rejected his preferred candidate.

Although Mr Erdogan’s share of the national vote increased to almost half the electorate in Sunday’s election, because of the complicated rules governing smaller parties, his parliamentary majority actually fell. Under Turkish electoral law a party must win 10 per cent of the national vote to enter parliament. The nationalist block crossed this threshold for the first time since 2002. Kurdish candidates, meanwhile, circumvented the rule by standing and winning seats as independent candidates. There have been no Kurdish MPs for more than a decade in Turkey.

Both the Nationalist Action Party (MHP) and the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) have a history of links to violence. Neither would appear to be compatible with the Prime Minister’s campaign to take Turkey into the European Union.

The MHP, whose youth wing, in particular, has been associated with nationalist killings in the past, has one new MP who was sentenced to hang for murder. He was released some years after his sentence was commuted to life and now reportedly advocates the death penalty for terrorism and separatism.

On the other side of the house, the DTP has so far refused to denounce the separatist guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and includes one MP whose trial for PKK links will be suspended while she enjoys parliamentary immunity. Another defended the imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Oçalan in court.

The last time a Kurdish party won seats, in 1991, MPs were thrown out of parliament after swearing their oath in the once-banned Kurdish language. Four of the MPs were in jail for ten years until new pro-EU laws led to their retrial and release – much to the disgust of nationalists. Despite worries that scuffles might break out in parliament, both parties have been at pains to assure voters that they are not there to “beat each other up”.

Despite the complexities of the new parliament and the reduced number of seats won by Mr Erdogan’s party, political observers believe that the scale of his election victory has strengthened the Government’s mandate. Mr Erdogan promised to uphold Turkey’s secularist traditions and to appoint a new president “without causing tensions”.

The presence of more parties removes the ability of the main opposition Republican People’s Party to bring parliament to deadlock as it did in May, forcing the early general elections. “We will follow a conciliatory, constructive approach as we are not going into parliament spoiling for a fight,” Cihan Pacaci, the MHP General-Secretary, said. “We are here to solve crises, not create them,” Ahmet Turk, the DTP leader, said.

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