HDP co-chair Demirtaş vows to ‘demolish’ election threshold

BERLIN – Anadolu Agency

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Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) Co-Chair Selahattin Demirtaş has confidently said his party will pass the 10 percent election threshold, even predicting that it will get as many as “25 percent of the votes.”

Speaking at the HDP’s overseas election campaign office in Berlin, Demirtaş said no government since 1980 - when a military coup took place and the 10 percent election threshold was introduced in the Turkish voting system - had wished to lower the threshold. But he vowed that the HDP would render the threshold unimportant by easily exceeding it.

“The [ruling Justice and Development Party] AKP may not have removed the election threshold, but they will probably regret it when they see the polling results. They will probably say, ‘I wish we had lifted the threshold to 20 percent.’ But even if they lifted the threshold to 20 percent we would still get 25 percent,” said Demirtaş on March 29.

“Whatever happens, that threshold will be demolished,” he added.

Demirtaş said that if the HDP manages to pass the threshold then the AKP will not be able to form a single party government any longer and a different scenario would prevail in Turkey.

He said the HDP does not do politics to “destroy anyone,” and identified Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç as an example from the government who feared the party.

“Let them be afraid of us. If they do not fear us then we have done something wrong. We are doing it right if we scare them,” said Demirtaş.

He also stated that the party had still yet to reach the point where they aimed to be and needed to “exert more efforts and be patient.”

“Sluggishness is the enemy of success. We should never feel sluggish,” said Demirtaş.

After his speech, Demirtaş visited the Berlin Cemevi, a place of worship for the German capital’s Alevi population.