22 YUMAK AND SADAK v. TURKEY JUDGMENT Turkey, in breach of the Court’s settled case-law. Accordingly, the free expression of the will of the majority of the electorate in the region concerned had been deliberately hindered. 90. More concretely, the applicants submitted that on account of the application of the electoral threshold in the 2002 parliamentary elections DEHAP, which was known for its interest in and commitment to the Kurdish question, had not obtained a single seat in Parliament although it had achieved very high scores in a number of constituencies. In their opinion it could not be considered that the parliamentary elections of 22 July 2007 had solved the problem, even though the DTP, the successor to DEHAP, had presented independent candidates. The fact that political parties supported by Kurds had presented independent candidates was in itself a handicap. 91. Consequently, in the applicants’ submission, the fact that they were not elected to the National Assembly on account of the national 10% threshold when in the parliamentary elections of 3 November 2002 the DEHAP list – to which they belonged – had obtained 45.95% of the votes cast in the constituency of Şırnak was incompatible with Article 3 of Protocol No. 1. They argued that the excessively high threshold was in conflict with the object and purpose of the provision concerned, which was to guarantee the right to the free expression of the opinion of the people in the choice of the legislature. By depriving a whole segment of the population of the possibility of one day being represented in Parliament by a party which voiced its opinions, the national threshold removed the very essence of that right. Such a serious and systematic interference with the rights of a whole group, unique as it was among all European electoral systems, could not be justified by the margin of appreciation left to the State and therefore manifestly constituted a violation of the Convention. 2. The Government 92. The Government asked the Grand Chamber to endorse the Chamber’s finding that there had been no violation of Article 3 of Protocol No. 1. 93. They submitted that the 10% threshold was calculated to ensure the country’s political stability by preventing excessive fragmentation of the composition of Parliament, and to strengthen democracy and political parties by encouraging the latter to propose policies accepted more or less generally throughout the country. The threshold did not infringe the fundamental principles of democracy such as pluralism. On the contrary, facilitating the election of independent candidates by exempting them from the 10% threshold made it possible for pluralism to put down deep roots in society. In that connection, the Government emphasised that between 1961 and 1980, when Turkey did not apply any threshold, there had been twenty changes of government in nineteen years, whereas between 1983 and 2007,