20 YUMAK AND SADAK v. TURKEY JUDGMENT 83. The applicants submitted that the Court should take account of the following factors: firstly, the crucial role of pluralism as a pillar of democracy and the consequent importance of political parties, particularly those which act to ensure that a particular region of a country can make its voice heard in Parliament; secondly, the fact that the electoral threshold used in Turkey was the highest among the member States of the Council of Europe and, since there were no corrective measures, the fact that it hindered the expression of certain social groups; thirdly, and lastly, the special situation in Turkey and the effects of the threshold in practice, namely the impossibility for any party based in one region to be represented in the National Assembly. If those factors were not taken into consideration, the right to free elections would be left to the arbitrary interpretation of individual States, which could use that fact to plead justification for thresholds higher than 10%. 84. The applicants also argued that the 10% threshold was not in conformity with the common European standard. The national threshold adopted in Turkey was the highest in Europe, or possibly in the world. If that threshold had been applied in other countries, a number of wellestablished parties would no longer participate in government; that would apply, for example, to the Free Democrats in Germany, the centrist and Christian parties in Scandinavia, the Greens in the Netherlands and the centre-left and the right in Italy. In most countries which had introduced a threshold, the level chosen was 5% (in 2001 the average was 4.25% in central and eastern Europe). Even countries which were experiencing serious problems regarding integration and which needed to stabilise party representation, in view of the existence of independent or very small parties, had not seen fit to impose thresholds twice as high. The applicants pointed out, by way of example, that in the 2002 elections an electoral threshold of 5% would have enabled eight parties (out of the eighteen which put up candidates), including DEHAP, to win seats in the Turkish Parliament, instead of just the two main national parties. 85. The argument that the applicants or other members of their party could have participated in the elections as independent candidates �� one of the Government’s main arguments and one of the grounds on which the Chamber had based its decision – disregarded the role of parties in the context of the political system. Neither independent candidatures nor the formation of alliances could take the place of independent political parties, since these played an essential role as fundamental elements of democracy. It was obvious that candidates who stood in their own name and were able to count only on their own limited personal and financial resources could not compete with parties which had considerable logistical and financial resources. 86. Moreover, in Turkey independent candidates were subject to a number of unfavourable restrictions and conditions. For example, the names