Women’s leadership is critical in safeguarding democracy against governmental overreach, asserted Halide Türkoğlu of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy (DEM) Party, as she criticised the Turkish Justice Ministry’s threats against her party.
At the DEM Party headquarters, female provincial co-chairs convened on Saturday to review recent election results and plan their political strategy for the coming period. During this gathering, Türkoğlu criticised the Turkish Justice Ministry for threatening the democratic process by targeting DEM Party-led municipalities with administrative takeovers and manipulative tactics. “Party closures and trustee appointments, along with perception operations targeting our municipalities, should be well understood; our people will not allow this,” she stated.
Türkoğlu praised the electoral success led by women, attributing high performance to their leadership despite adversities. She emphasised the public’s endorsement of the co-chair system, a model of governance based on equal representation, with one male and one female chair, which has faced significant criticism from current political powers. “The co-chair system has been criminalised by the Turkish state for years. However, the elections have shown that our co-chair system has received great support and approval from the society,” she explained.
Türkoğlu argued that by participating actively and decisively in the electoral process, women voters and leaders have communicated a clear rejection of the status quo, which has often been marred by violence and suppression.
The DEM Party has been targeted by a smear campaign, which included the use of evidently photoshopped images intended to falsely associate the party with banned organisations. This campaign, propagated by pro-government trolls and further endorsed and spread by government officials on social media, aims to lay the groundwork for potentially closing the party or replacing elected DEM Party officials with government appointees—a practice known as trusteeship that undermines Kurdish representation.
Although the campaign was thoroughly exposed, neither have the disseminators of this disinformation apologised nor the orchestrators of the smear campaign been publicly identified. The DEM Party has criticised the Turkish government for not respecting the will of the people, specifically pointing to the threats of party closure and the appointment of trustees as attempts to undermine the democratic functions of municipalities.