The pro-Kurdish DEM party presented its own candidate for mayor of Istanbul on Friday, sparking a split vote in municipal elections scheduled for late March that could favor Erdogan’s party, AFP reported.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his wife Emine voted in IstanbulPhoto: Umit Bektas/AP/Profimedia

That year, the party, the country’s third-largest political force, backed the candidate of the CHP, the main opposition party, against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamic-conservative AKP.

Meral Danis Bestas, MP for Erzurum (East), will be the party’s candidate in Istanbul, People’s Democracy and Equality Party (DEM) spokesperson Aysegul Dogan told the media.

Meral Danis Bestas, 56, worked as a human rights lawyer for several years before being elected four times as an MP for a pro-Kurdish party since 2015.

Under the co-presidency system inspired by the German Greens, which applies to all elected party officials, her challenger will be Murat Čepny, a former lawmaker.

“We are a political movement, strong and experienced enough not to limit ourselves to actions like others [formațiuni] win or lose,” Dogan said to justify the party’s decision.

Başak Demirtaş, the wife of the former co-chairman of the party and the very popular Selahattin Demirtaş, who has been in prison since 2016 and has officially retired from politics, was mentioned as a possible candidate in Istanbul.

But Ms Demirtas, seen as a strong potential candidate, announced on Wednesday that she would not run after consulting her party.

Opponents of the DEM candidate in Istanbul accuse the pro-Kurdish party of facilitating a possible AKP victory by depriving outgoing CHP Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu of support from Kurdish voters.

Imamoglu won the city in 2019 with the support of the right-wing Iyi party and indirect support from a pro-Kurdish party that chose not to field a candidate to avoid splitting the opposition vote in the city of 16 million, which is home to a large Kurdish community.

But many Kurdish voters have not forgiven the CHP’s stance, which turned against them between the first and second rounds of last May’s presidential election.

In January, Erdogan tasked his former environment minister, Murat Kurum, with winning back the mayorship of Istanbul, the country’s richest city where he was born and served as mayor in the 1990s, seeking revenge for his most humiliating election defeat. two decades of rule.