Europe | Kingmakers and scapegoats

Turkey’s Kurds are joining the coalition to oust Erdogan

They are persecuted outsiders—and influential powerbrokers

Supporters of imprisoned Selahattin Demirtas, presidential candidate of the pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party (HDP), hold HDP and Turkish flags with picture of Demirtas during an election campaign in Istanbul on June 17, 2018. - The Turkish president announced on April 18, 2018 that Turkey will hold snap parliamentary and presidential elections on June 24, 2018. The presidential and parliamentary elections were scheduled to be held in November 2019, but government has decided to change the date following the recommendation of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahceli. (Photo by Yasin AKGUL / AFP)        (Photo credit should read YASIN AKGUL/AFP via Getty Images)
Image: Getty Images
|KIZILTEPE

NILUFER Elik Yilmaz’s tenure as mayor of Kiziltepe, a town in Turkey’s south-east, was short-lived. In November 2019, seven months after she was elected, Mrs Yilmaz, a member of the People’s Democratic Party, Turkey’s main Kurdish one, was ousted by the interior ministry and replaced by a government appointee. Weeks later, she was locked up on terrorist charges. Freed on parole over a year later, she was recently sentenced to more than six years in prison, pending appeal. Across the Kurdish south-east, stories like hers are the rule, not the exception. Of the 171 mayors elected on the HDP’s ticket in the past decade, some 154 have been dismissed or prevented from taking office. Dozens have been arrested. “This cycle has to end,” says Mrs Yilmaz. But that all depends on Turkey’s upcoming elections.

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline “Kingmakers and scapegoats ”

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