With less than a month to go before Turkey goes to the polls, Green Left (YSP) campaigns have been attracting great interest, bolstered by the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) candidates running under their lists due to the threat of closure the major pro-Kurdish party faces.
Several YSP office opening events were held over the weekend in Istanbul, İzmir, Ankara, Aydın and Balıkesir.
In the western province of Izmir, YSP’s women’s election office was inaugurated on Sunday and named after a young female party member Deniz Poyraz, shot in 2021 in the party’s provincial seat while the offices were under police surveillance.
Meanwhile in Istanbul’s Okmeydanı, a Green Left Party election festival organised for Sunday by the party’s Youth Assembly was banned by the District Governorate. The youths protested the ban by gathering in front of the HDP building on the same street where 15-year-old Berkin Elvan was shot in the head with a tear gas canister fired by police during the 2013 Gezi Park protests.
YSP opening events and election campaigns were met with enthusiasm in southeastern Turkey’s Kurdish-majority cities. At events in Diyarbakır (Amed), Tunceli (Dersim), Hakkari (Colemerg), Mardin (Merdin) and Şırnak (Şırnex) over the weekend, party members called on voters to support the Green Left Party in tackling the government’s policy of war against Kurdish regions in Syria and Iraq.
At Sunday’s opening event at the YSP women’s office in Mardin’s district of Nusaybin (Nisêbîn), Turkish police attacked the crowd and detained several people.
Analysts say the Kurdish vote will play a decisive role in the election of a new president and members of parliament on the 14 May. Meanwhile, Turkey’s Constitutional Court ordered its rapporteur to prepare the final report on the HDP closure case file last week. When the report is complete, the court will set a date for its 15 members to reach a verdict.
