The balance point sits where nobody stands.

Two camps with nothing in between.

The nearest parties to zero are the CHP and Yeni Parti at −3 and Saadet at +3. Across the six points of axis between them — the whole of what would elsewhere be the political centre — there is nothing. 0% of Turkish voters back a party within one and a half points of the middle. In Britain the equivalent figure is 11.2%.

What is left is two blocs sitting a long way from each other. The left camp holds 42.7% of the placed vote and centres on −3.74. The right camp holds 56.5% and centres on +6.61. The distance between them is 10.35 points — more than half the width of the entire scale, with no bridge across it.

The honest complication is that this does not make Türkiye more polarised than Britain on this axis. It is marginally less so. Turkish dispersion is 5.31 against a British 5.56, and only 18.4% of the Turkish vote sits at the far ends of the scale against 27.1% in Britain. Türkiye has a hollow middle rather than heavy extremes.

Which should be the first clue that the axis is measuring the wrong thing. Anyone who follows Turkish politics knows the country is more divided than a British-style left–right chart makes it look. The division simply does not run along this line.

Nationalism is not a wing. It is the floor.

In most European systems, nationalism is a position held by parties of the right and rejected by parties of the left. In Türkiye it is closer to a shared premise. The CHP is not merely a social-democratic party that happens to be patriotic; it is the party of Mustafa Kemal, founded on Turkish national identity, and for most of its history opposed to Kurdish political autonomy in terms the MHP would recognise. Yeni Parti inherits that tradition wholesale. İYİ Parti is a nationalist split from a nationalist party. The AKP governs through a Turkish-Islamic synthesis and has spent nine years allied to the MHP.

Score each party on nationalism from 0 to 10 and plot it against the left–right position, and the shape of Turkish politics changes completely. Parties spread widely along the horizontal. On the vertical they pile up at the top.

83.9% of the placed vote goes to parties scoring 6 or higher on nationalism. Only DEM Parti and TİP — 9.8% between them — sit at the pluralist end, and DEM is there because it represents the minority the consensus is defined against. The weighted mean on this axis is 6.36 out of 10, and the spread around it is 2.39, less than half the dispersion on left–right. On the question that actually divides Turkish politics, the electorate is not spread out at all. It is bunched at one end.

This is what the centre-right headline number conceals. Add the religious-conservative right to the secular-Kemalist parties whose nationalism is every bit as firm, and the conservative-or-nationalist share of the Turkish electorate runs well beyond two-thirds. A voter can be secular, urban, hostile to Erdoğan, a lifelong CHP supporter — and still hold views on the Kurdish question, on Syrian refugees, on the indivisibility of the state, that would place them on the right of any European ballot.

The Zafer Partisi is the clearest evidence. Ümit Özdağ's party is built almost entirely on hostility to Syrian and Afghan migrants, and its 3.2% does not come only from the MHP. It draws from secular, CHP-leaning voters too — people whose anti-immigration politics is framed as defending a secular republic rather than an Islamic one. On a left–right chart those voters appear to have jumped from −3 to +9.5, which looks inexplicable. On the nationalism axis they have barely moved at all.

Both the mean and the median sit on the right.

Sort every voter along the left–right axis and the person at the halfway mark stands at +5.5, among İYİ Parti voters. 56.5% of the placed vote goes to parties right of zero against 42.7% left of it. Britain's median voter sits at −1, left of centre, with only the mean dragged rightward. Türkiye has no such consolation for the left: both measures land on the same side.

Drifting left, and no more divided than before.

Against the 2023 parliamentary election the centre of gravity has moved left by 0.52 points. That is not a leftward turn so much as an arithmetic consequence of the MHP and İYİ both shrinking while the opposition bloc, in its new configuration, holds roughly its combined share.

More striking is what has not changed. Dispersion is 5.31 today against 5.31 in 2023 — identical to two decimal places, through a presidential election, a municipal landslide, the jailing of an opposition mayor and the fracture of the main opposition party. Britain's rose 17% over a comparable stretch. Türkiye did not become more polarised because there was no room left to become so.

The biggest polling argument in Türkiye barely moves the number.

Pollsters disagree violently about how the old CHP vote has divided between Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu's rump party and Özgür Özel's Yeni Parti. Optimar puts the CHP on 16.3% and Yeni Parti on 12.6%. YÖN has it nearly reversed. That is the loudest dispute in Turkish polling right now.

It makes almost no difference here. Both parties occupy the same position on both axes, because the split was organisational and personal rather than ideological — a fight over the leadership of a party, not over what the party believes. Move the entire bloc from one to the other and the centre of gravity shifts by five hundredths of a point.