“The only potential candidate HDP opposes is Mansur Yavas”

The only person People’s Democratic Party (HDP) opposes among the potentials to be nominated as the joint candidate of the opposition against President Tayyep Erdogan in the upcoming elections is Mansur Yavas, the mayor of Turkey’s capital Ankara, HDP group deputy chairwoman Meral Danis Bestas said on Saturday. "HDP voters would never approve of his candidacy. In our view, he is not a part of the equation," Bestas said.

Nationalist politician and lawyer Mansur Yavas, 66, defeated the AKP (Justice and Development Party) candidate in 2019 municipal elections in the Turkish capital as the CHP (Republican People’s Party) candidate backed by an opposition alliance. Previously he served for 10 years as the nationalist MHP (Nationalist Movement Party) mayor of an Ankara district until 2009. He left the MHP in 2013 and joined the CHP the same year before narrowly losing the Ankara municipal election in 2014. Opinion polls indicate strong support for Yavas as a potential challenger to Erdogan and Good Party Meral Aksener openly supported his candidacy.

Bestas said what the HDP cared about was principles, not names, but when asked, she said Yavas was “timid, he can't take a stand,” referring to the Kurdish question.

“The [potential carndidates’] approach to the Kurdish question is like a litmus paper. (...) Everyone has to break their minds on this. You have to face the past. We have to accept that the Kurds, like everyone else, are the owners and citizens of this country,” Bestas said, in an interview with Radio Sputnik.