Turkey: Kurdish leader hints support at main opposition leader’s candidacy

Jailed Kurdish leader Selahattin Demirtas signaled support for the main opposition leader’s candidacy in the next year’s presidential elections in an interview with Medyascope web site.

CHP (People’s Republican Party) leader Kilicdaroglu “seems to have significant support in different social segments. In such polarized societies, it is not an easy task to offer solutions for every issue and to unite the society around them,” Demirtas said. 

Former HDP (Peoples’ Democratic party) Co-Chair said that Kilicdaroglu suffers a great injustice in a debate surrounding his Alevi identity, which some see as a frailty against a powerful Erdogan, Turkey’s president who already announced himself as the candidate of the ruling block. 

Six opposition parties including the CHP who made an alliance against the ruling block are working on putting forward a joint name to run against Erdogan at the elections, but yet to declare a candidate. HDP is not among that opposition bloc.

Kilicdaroglu, who already voiced his willingness to run should the opposition alliance agree on his name, said in late June that it would be more appropriate to put forward a joint candidate with the HDP, which had 11,7 percent of the votes in the 2018 elections. 

Those who think that Turkey is their private registered land poison the political scene. 

Demirtas also blasted nationalist circles who wanted to exclude Kurds from Turkey’s political scene. 

Recently, when a CHP deputy said it would only be natural for the HDP to be given a minister when he was talking about a hypothetical cabinet, he was lambasted not only by the ruling block but also by nationalist Iyi Party (Good Party) from the opposition, whose chair said they could not “coexist with HDP.”

“The language they use is politically unethical, offensive and exclusionary. The haste to get a couple of nationalist votes demonstrated the very essence of these people,” Demirtas said. 

HDP is accused by nationalist parties of having ties with the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party), an armed group that has been fighting Turkey for four decades, but it denies allegations.

“Those who think that Turkey is their private registered land poison the political scene. They calculate how they can fill their pockets by discriminating people. And then they try to cover up the filth they spread with flags. This mentality turned Turkey into hell, bringing the society on the brink of economical, social and cultural collapse,”  Demirtas said, adding that when a historical opportunity was rising for great change and reform, it was not acceptable to impose the old tricks in the name of a so-called opposition.