Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish opposition party on Sunday said it would field a candidate in March’s mayoral election for İstanbul, which could boost the chances of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling party, Agence France-Presse reported.
Erdoğan’s Islamic conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP) candidate Binali Yıldırım was defeated in 2019 when the secular Turkish opposition joined forces and rallied behind a single contender, Ekrem İmamoğlu.
That ended 15 years of AKP rule in the city’s town hall.
But the opposition has fractured ahead of municipal elections at the end of next month, which should help Erdoğan’s allies in ethnically mixed cities such as İstanbul.
The pro-Kurdish People’s Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party), formerly known as the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), announced on Sunday that it would reveal its candidate for the İstanbul mayoral elections on February 9.
Speculation has swirled that Başak Demirtaş, whose husband Selahattin Demirtaş is a former party co-president but has been in jail since 2016, will be nominated.
Some critics claim that the DEM Party has come to an arrangement with Erdoğan to withdraw its support for İmamoğlu’s re-election bid in return for Selahattin Demirtaş’s freedom.
Demirtaş was in 2016 convicted of “terrorist propaganda” and sentenced to up to 142 years in jail.
İmamoğlu’s 2019 victory was aided by direct support from the right-wing İYİ (Good) Party and indirectly by the then-HDP, which did not field a candidate.
But his re-election hopes are already under threat as the İYİ Party in December pulled out of the alliance.
İmamoğlu, 52, has been convicted of insulting a public official and could be forced to resign should the ruling be upheld.
In January, Erdoğan entrusted his former environment minister Murat Kurum, 47, with the challenge of winning back İstanbul.
