Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) deputy Mehmet Rüştü Tiryaki has said that the HDP has options in securing its future, stating that the party “not only consists of buildings and plaques. It is an idea and a grassroots movement.”
Tiryaki described the closure case filed against his party by the Supreme Court as a gift to the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), adding that, although the government was against the closure of political parties in theory, this did not apply in practice.
What happened?
On 17 March Bekir Şahin, the chief prosecutor of Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeals, submitted an indictment to the Constitutional Court seeking to permanently close the HDP.
The prosecutor accused the HDP, the third-largest opposition party in the country, of attempting “to destroy the inseparable unity of the Turkish state and the nation”, and of working with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and “its subsidiaries”. However, the Constitutional Court later rejected the indictment on the grounds of errors in the appeal.