CHP says has no votes to slide to HDP

ANKARA

CİHAN photo

Turkey’s main opposition party has criticized the minor opposition party, Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), vowing not to let votes slide from their party to the latter with the idea of letting it pass the 10 percent threshold required to hold seats at parliament.

“Mr. Demirtaş, now you are speaking. Weren’t you the one who said ‘This is a coup attempt,’ during the Gezi incidents?” Haluk Koç, the spokesperson for the social-democrat Republican People’s Party (CHP), said Sept. 22. 

“Weren’t you the one who sent all kinds of support to the AKP [the Justice and Development Party] when education system was drawn away from modernity at parliament? Weren’t you the one who withdrew the HDP member when the commission for investigating corruption was founded? Why were you given votes?

You were given votes in order for you ‘to distance yourself from terror’ and ‘become legitimate political representative,’” Koç said, as he attended a party convention in the capital city of Ankara. 

“We say ‘human first;’ politics based on race disintegrate and decay the society. Today, under the HDP’s motto of ‘I’m addressing wide masses,’ there are unfortunately policies based on race,” he said, while indicating that votes from its own grassroots would be sufficient for the HDP to pass the threshold in the Nov. 1 snap election.

“The CHP doesn’t have a single vote to give to anybody as saying ‘let this happen, let that happen,’” Koç said.

According to official results announced on June 18 by the Supreme Election Board (YSK), the AKP received 40.66 percent of the total votes in the June 7 election, the CHP won 25.13 percent, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) won 16.45 percent and the HDP won 12.96 percent.

It has been widely assumed and acknowledged by both CHP and HDP politicians that 1 to 3 percent of the CHP’s electorate potential shifted to the HDP in order to get the latter to pass the 10 percent threshold.