With its progressive and realistic election programme and wide range of candidates, HDP represents a preferable political party for the workers, farmers, women, youth, LGTBI, different ethnic and/or religious groups. An election success of HDP will raise hopes of people for a change in current situation of the country also by bringing closer the Gezi resistance and the Kobanê resistance.
Turkey will hold a very critical general election on 7 June this Sunday. After continuous governments of Justice and Development Party (AKP) for almost 13 years, now there is a chance to prevent its increasingly authoritarian governing manner and its leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s desire to become the president, the only ruler of the country. For this to happen, the leftist Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) should pass the very anti-democratic election threshold of 10%. Only with this way AKP’s seats in parliament will decrease under the number that they needed to change the constitution by themselves.
Founded in 2015, HDP is a kind of umbrella party of Kurdish movement, socialists, social democrats, Alevi movement, democrat Muslims etc. and describes itself as “We are the party of the working class, labourers, producing villagers, small retailers, pensioners, women, youth, intellectuals, artists, LGBTI individuals, disabled”. Also it is consisted of every nation, every language, culture and belief that united their forces to achieve the goal of all the forces of people wanted to and the ones who move towards to the democratic peoples power.
HDP now has 29 MPs in the parliament who were elected as independents under the banner of Labour, Peace and Freedom Block in 2011 general elections in order to surpass the election threshold and then joined the party. This result was achieved despite the loss of more than 30 seats to AKP. After two consecutive elections of taking part with independent candidates, now HDP will take part as a political party in the elections to not to give the seats to AKP for free.
Also taking part as a political party in the elections, gives the chance to prove that progressive, left politics are taking into account by voters. With its progressive and realistic election programme and wide range of candidates, HDP represents a preferable political party for the workers, farmers, women, youth, LGTBI, different ethnic and/or religious groups.
HDP, again with its own words, is a party of freedom and equality a pro-peace, pro-labour, pro-selfgovernment, pro-gender equality and a green party. In accordance with these characteristics, here are some of the topics about the most crucial problems of Turkey from the 34 paged electoral programme of HDP:
- Democratic Constitution
- Political Parties and Election Law
- Jurisdiction Reform
- Press and Communication Freedom
- Democratic Autonomy and Local Democracy
- Kurdish Problem and Resolution Process
- An Egalitarian, Libertarian, Peaceful Foreign Policy
- Human Rights, Equality for Peoples, Freedom for Beliefs
- Women: Let’s Dream Because We Can Make Our Dreams Come True
- Youth Will Build a New Life that Produces Equality and Freedom
- Economy: Secured Job, Secured Future, Humanely Life
- Ecology
- Education, Health, Culture and Art, Sports
After the electoral success of Workers Party of Turkey, which became the first leftist party in Turkey to win representation in the national parliament when it got 3% of votes and won 15 seats in 1965, now there is a great chance for HDP to repeat and even go beyond that success. An election success of HDP will raise hopes of people for a change in current situation of the country also by bringing closer the Gezi resistance and the Kobanê resistance. Also success of a progressive party in this region, where fundamentalist powers are rapidly growing with the support of some governments, will be a starting point to change course of events.