Selahattin Demirtaş, a Kurdish nationalist politician and former president of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), announced late yesterday through his Twitter profile his decision to leave active politics, a few days after Erdoğan’s victory in the Turkish presidential elections. “On my own behalf, I sincerely apologize for not being able to introduce a political approach worthy of our people. I leave active politics at this stage” he said.
Demirtaş, co-chairman of the HDP from 2014 to 2018, has been in prison since 2016 accused of links to the PKK terrorist group; in 2018 he ran for Turkish Presidency in behalf of his party, becoming the first candidate in Turkish history to campaign from jail. However, his relationship with the current HDP leaders has been deteriorating since then; he recently criticized the leadership of the Kurdish nationalist party for rejecting him as a candidate in the presidential elections (the HDP, which was included in the lists of the Green Left Party, did not present a candidate and preferred to support Kılıçdaroğlu), accusing them of acting “as a local association and not as a political party”, and called for a change in the leadership of the HDP.
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Pablo Gómez is a specialist in Turkey and has been editor-in-chief of Hispanatolia since 2011. He has been analysing current affairs and geopolitics in Turkey and the surrounding region since 2006.
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