YUMAK AND SADAK v. TURKEY JUDGMENT 19 77. In the first place, the applicants considered that, as the 10% threshold prevented a large part of the population from expressing its choice regarding its parliamentary representation, it quite evidently constituted a serious interference with the right to participation and served no legitimate aim for the purposes of Article 3 of Protocol No. 1. 78. In that connection, the applicants challenged the argument that the measure complained of was intended to strengthen parliamentary stability. They asserted that the military authorities, who had taken power in the 1980 coup d’état, placed the full blame for the social and political agitation in Turkey between 1970 and 1980, and the governmental instability it had led to, on the electoral system then in force. In their opinion it was artificial to establish a causal link between the threshold and the political situation in Turkey in the 1970s, as assessed in the Chamber’s judgment. 79. The applicants laid emphasis on the fact that two of the four elections in which proportional representation was used without recourse to the electoral threshold (those of 1965 and 1969) had produced single-party governments; the other two (those of 1973 and 1977) had led to coalition governments. 80. Moreover, though it was not excluded that lowering or abolishing the national electoral threshold would lead to a coalition government, such an outcome was not necessarily synonymous with governmental instability. Coalition governments were sometimes more stable than single-party governments. 81. The applicants contended that it was difficult to defend the view that the exceptional measure in question strengthened representative democracy. The Council of Europe had been created to strengthen democracy and democratic values. Although the Contracting States certainly had a broad margin of appreciation in the matter, they could not rely on that latitude – without taking into account the right to fair representation – to an unlimited or disproportionate extent, namely by excluding from the political life of the country a particular discrete segment of the population. 82. Such a high national threshold made representation very unfair and led to a crisis of legitimacy for the government, since Parliament ought to be the free tribune of any democracy. Clearly, a Parliament whose composition reflected only about 55% of the votes cast was not capable of supplying the representative legitimacy on which any democracy is based. In that connection, the applicants pointed out that in the parliamentary elections of 1987, 1991, 1995 and 1999 the proportion of the votes cast in favour of parties not represented in Parliament had been, respectively, 19.4% (about 4,500,000 votes), 0.5% (about 140,000 votes), 14% (about 4,000,000 votes) and 18.3% (about 6,000,000 votes). The results of the 2002 election had led to a “crisis of representation”, since 45.3% of the votes – that is, about 14,500,000 votes – had not been taken into consideration and were not reflected in the composition of Parliament.