Demirtas: "We are a movement of the invincibles"

A message by imprisoned Kurdish politician Selahattin Demirtas, urging voters to be confident and not to be discouraged by the results of the presidential race's first round, was posted in Twitter on Friday.

Demirtas said:

"We won't give up our hope, our dreams, our future to tyranny. We are a movement of humanity. We are a movement of the invincibles."

He added, in Turkish and Kurdish: "Get up and bring change!"

Although no candidate could secure more than the 50% vote at the first round of the election on 14 May, the voters of the opposition have been greatly disappointed after their candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu received remarkably lower than what most pollsters predicted.

Erdogan narrowly missed the majority as he received 49.4 against his rival's 45%, despite high inflation and currency crisis, and is now looking forward to a relatively comfortable win at the runoff.

Kilicdaroglu has chosen to strike a nationalist tone in an attempt to woo the voters of ultra-nationalist independent candidate Sinan Ogan, and pledged to send home Syrian refugees who he referred to as "potential crime machines."

Demirtas, former co-chair of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), has been incarcerated since November 2016 over spurious charges and is denied release despite a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights.