Turkish Leftists

Presidential and parliamentary elections will be held in Türkiye on May 14. UA:SOUTH continues the analysis of the main contenders for the votes of Turkish citizens

In the new Turkish parliament, Erdoğan’s party and its allies will lose even a simple majority. Its 28th convocation in the Mejlis will most certainly not be held by anyone, which is why it is important who will become the president in case of early elections.

However, for the first time in many years, the left forces will strengthen in the Mejlis. Two blocs are going to the elections:

1. Labor and Freedom Bloc
2. Socialist Bloc

Both combine marginal Marxist, Leninist, and Maoist ideas. At the same time, the second bloc will not pass, but the first, thanks to the Kurds, will receive at least 11-12% of the votes.

For the first time in many years, the Kurdish political force does not participate in the elections due to the threat of the People's Democracy Party being closed by the Constitutional Court.

All Kurdish candidates are nominated on the lists of the Green Left Party. The leaders of three more small left-wing parties, as well as representatives of minorities: Assyrian, Roma, Circassian, Alevi, and LGBT+ are nominated on the GLP list. However, there is one party in the bloc that nominated its own lists in 53 of the country's 87 electoral districts. This is the Turkish Workers' Party (TIP in Turkish). It still has 4 deputies in the parliament, who last time passed on the lists of the Kurds or RNP (Ataturkist opposition).

Due to the fact that they are in the block with transit Kurds, they do not have to worry about the 7% barrier. If the block together gains 7%, then all batches of the block pass.

TIR had a rating of 1% at the beginning of the election, but now it is approaching 3%. This will not make it possible to host many candidates, but the party will most likely have its own five bright tribunes.

Here it is necessary to explain a little about the peculiarities of the Turkish proportional system.

All provinces of Türkiye are constituencies with different numbers of deputies. The small provinces of Bayburt and Tunceli have a minimum quota of 1 deputy each. There, in fact, majoritarian elections take place: whoever gets the most votes will enter the parliament. Antalya has a quota of 17 deputies. And the country's four largest cities are divided into districts: Istanbul and Ankara - three, and Izmir and Bursa - two.

The largest district in the country is Istanbul constituency number three. It has a quota of 36 deputies. Therefore, each party can nominate a list of 36 candidates in it. And this means that it is enough to get 2.78% of votes to secure one deputy. However, this can happen if a party or bloc overcomes the 7% barrier in the country as a whole.

Once upon a time, it was thanks to the three Istanbul constituencies, which have quotas of 27 to 36 deputies, that self-nominees entered the parliament. There, it was enough to gain 3-4% in the district, i.e. the "cost" of one deputy seat.

In the Turkish Workers' Party, each nominee is a public and recognizable person. Their 4 deputies in the current parliament could stir up hundreds of deputies of the ruling party with fiery accusations and understandable short revolutionary speeches.

Now, famous people, especially from the actors’ environment reached out to them.

The party is gaining support among the youth, who understand leftist slogans: capitalists suck the blood of the Turkish people - if this government is overthrown and the wealth is redistributed, justice will increase in the country.

For Ukraine, this is probably the least unacceptable of the country's left parties. At least the leader of the TIP, Erkan Baş, openly admitted his hatred for Putin, however, like other leftists, they blame NATO for the war in Ukraine, "which provoked Russia's desire to expand to the East."

The rest of the Turkish left is at best left in the 1980s, and half of them are still either Stalinists or Trotskyists.