Pervin Buldan and Mithat Sancar, the co-chairs of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), known for its alleged ties to the outlawed PKK terrorist group, will reportedly not be rerunning for party leadership at the first HDP congress since Türkiye’s presidential and parliamentary elections last month.
The HDP is currently facing a potential ban in an ongoing lawsuit calling for a shutdown of its activities mainly due to its alleged “collusion with the PKK and its affiliates, transferring funds to terrorists and aiming to destroy and eliminate the indivisible integrity of the state with its country and nation.”
In order to skirt the lawsuit, the party ran under the Green Left Party (YSP) in May 14’s legislative polls and managed to earn 61 parliamentary seats, down by six from the 2018 elections.
It saw its hopes dashed in presidential polls, as well, after endorsing the main six-party opposition bloc’s joint candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu who was defeated by incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in a historic runoff.
According to Buldan and Sancar, the election outcome was not “a defeat” but still “far from what we aimed for.”
“We couldn’t manage the campaign very well and failed to convey the HDP’s vision to all factions,” Buldan admitted in a televised interview on Sunday.
She informed that both she and Sancar would step down as co-chairs at the upcoming party congress in light of criticisms.
“I will be happy to hand over my post to a fellow member. I would also like to say that I will not take part in the decision-making process either,” she noted.
“We will answer to our people, to women and voters,” she stressed.
Sancar too denied any “failure” and said the move was to pave way for “criticism, self-criticism and explanation.”
“We don’t want co-chairs to lock the HDP,” he said. “I am stepping down to lift the HDP to a stronger position.”
The move came days after the party’s former leader Selahattin Demirtaş, who has been in prison since 2016 for spreading terrorist propaganda and having ties to the PKK, reprimanded the HDP’s performance for being less than satisfactory.
As he announced his retirement from active politics, Demirtaş criticized his party for lack of an effective election strategy.
In an article for an independent Turkish daily newspaper, Demirtaş bemoaned that the Kurdish political movement made “shoddy work” and “realized too late the fact that the latest elections were the most important in all aspects.”
“I’ve been trying to spread this fact with my letters and messages in the past five years, but my voice resounded, with echoes only reverberating to me,” he wrote, eliciting backlash from the party’s base.
“We don’t think it’s right to question (Demirtaş’s) intentions,” Sancar separately said.
He revealed that he and Buldan visited Demirtaş before he announced his retirement, as well as two former members of the HDP who both advised a woman be elected as the HDP’s new leader.
“Demirtaş too supported this idea,” Sancar noted.
