The pro-Kurdish opposition party HDP only wants to be active within the green-left party YSP in the future. She is reacting to the threat of a party ban after she was accused of being close to terrorism.
The decision was made at a special party conference of the HDP in Ankara. Former co-leader Mithat Sancar said it was the result of a process launched by the party after Turkey’s parliamentary and presidential elections in May. According to Sancar, the spirit of the HDP lives on in the Green Left Party (YSP).
In the last parliamentary elections, the HDP ran under the umbrella of the YSP. The reason was a motion to ban the HDP, which the Turkish constitutional court accepted in 2021. This means that the party is threatened with a ban and its current officials are no longer allowed to work.
Attorney General’s Office accuses HDP of terror
The Attorney General’s Office accuses the party of being involved in terrorist activities on the part of the banned Kurdish Workers’ Party PKK. The HDP had always rejected this. In the parliamentary elections in May this year, the Left Party received almost nine percent of the votes and has 61 seats in the Turkish National Assembly.
The HDP had its greatest success in the June 2015 elections. At that time, it prevented President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP from gaining an absolute majority. He then achieved a repeat of the election, in which the HDP came just over the then applicable ten percent hurdle and the AKP gained an absolute majority.
Former HDP co-chair Selahattin Demirtas has been in prison since 2016, according to his party on political grounds.