The Rise of a New Left in Turkey?
Posted on Jun 12, 2015
By Juan Cole
In the name “Peoples’ Democratic Party” (HDP), the word “peoples” (halklar) is plural, insisting on ethnic pluralism. The party just won 13 percent of the votes in Turkey’s parliamentary election, thereby denying an absolute majority to the ruling center-right Justice and Development Party (AKP). It made waves in socially conservative Turkey by championing gay rights, women’s rights, leftist causes like labor and a “normalization” of the Turkish majority’s relationship with the 20 percent of the population that is Kurdish. The party has female and male co-leaders, Figen Yuksekdag and Selahattin Demirtas. Among its primary goals, now achieved, was ensuring that President Tayyip Erdogan’s party, the AKP, could not change the Constitution and impose a presidential system on the country.
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