The leader of Turkey’s main opposition party has said a quote attributed to his party declining to join street protests against the suspensions of mayors had been misrepresented, Turkish news site Gazete Duvar reported.
Turkish press sources reported that the secularist main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) had said it did not find street protests the right course of action after the government suspended three mayors of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) for alleged terror links.
But CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu said the press had not accurately represented his party’s stance on the issue during a meeting with HDP co-chair Sezai Temelli and union leaders.
The quote, Kılıçdaroğlu said, was made in relation to the decision to annul the election of Ekrem İmamoğlu, the CHP candidate who won the March 31 local elections.
Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) government pushed for İmamoğlu’s mandate to be revoked, alleging that electoral fraud had taken place.
When İmamoğlu’s mandate was revoked in May, some voices in the CHP called for street protests, while others said the party should boycott the election. The party chose to enter the election instead, and the CHP candidate came back to win the rerun with a landslide on June 23.
Kılıçdaroğlu said the party’s statement had referred to this situation, and not the suspension of the three HDP mayors.
Adnan Selçuk Mızraklı, Ahmet Türk and Bedia Özgökçe Ertan, the mayors of Diyarbakir, Mardin and Van provinces, respectively, were dismissed over alleged links to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), an armed group that has been at war in Turkey for three decades.
The suspension of the mayors has triggered mass protests around the country, and particularly in the predominantly Kurdish southeast. Dozens of pro-Kurdish mayors were dismissed and replaced with government appointees after the previous round of local polls in 2014, also for alleged terror links.