“Turkish democracy has once again shown its maturity,” President Erdogan said in a speech after the local elections last Sunday evening. In it, he acknowledged that his AKP had suffered a major defeat and emphasized that he accepted the results and would learn lessons from them. “We recognize no power above the will of the people.”
Two days later, the freshly elected mayor of the predominantly Kurdish city of Van in the far east of Turkey has already been sidelined. Not Abdullah Zeydan, the candidate of the predominantly Kurdish DEM Party, who received more than 55 percent of the votes, but the AKP candidate, who received 27 percent of the votes, received the election certificate there, Turkish media reported on Tuesday afternoon.
Strict control
“It shows for the umpteenth time that in Turkey ‘the will of the people’ does not have the same value everywhere,” says Yohanan Benhaïm, a political scientist at the French Institute for Anatolian Studies (IFEA) in Istanbul who specializes in Kurdish politics. “When Erdogan says he accepts the election results, he means the results in western Turkey. In the predominantly Kurdish regions in the east of the country, completely different rules apply.”
Newly elected Kurdish mayors were also denied their election certificates in the 2019 local elections. In recent years, dozens of Kurdish mayors have been removed from office and sentenced to years in prison for terrorism-related crimes such as financing the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party). These deposed mayors were replaced by one appointed by the AKP government kayyum (curator).
Zeydan, who was elected in Van, had already been imprisoned for six years after a terror conviction, partly because of statements in which he praised the strength of the PKK. He was released in 2022 and was given back his previously ‘deprived rights’ (such as holding political office) by the court. Moreover, the Supreme Electoral Council had approved Zeydan’s candidacy for mayor after strict scrutiny.
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But the AKP government appears to have devised a legal ruse. On Friday afternoon, two days before the elections, the decision to return Zeydan’s ‘privileged rights’ was reversed at the request of the Ministry of Justice. Normally this requires a long appeal procedure, but apparently this does not apply when the AKP wants to sideline a political opponent.
Residents of Van took to the streets on Tuesday to demand that Zeydan still become mayor. The police shot at them with tear gas and deployed a large show of force, according to images on X. In the meantime, the hashtag A coup is underway in Van trending nationally, the newly re-elected CHP mayor in Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, expressed his support for Zeydan, and the CHP announced that it would send a delegation to Van in solidarity.
“The question now is whether that solidarity will continue,” says Benhaïm. “In the past, the CHP has done little to stand up for pro-Kurdish parties. If that changes, it could have major consequences for Turkish politics.”
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