Turkey council confirms ban on pro-Kurdish elected officials

ANKARA — Turkey’s supreme electoral council on Thursday upheld a ban on candidates from a pro-Kurdish party taking office after they won local elections, state news agency Anadolu reported. 

The council, known by its Turkish initials YSK, last week decided to bar the candidates from taking up their posts because they were on a list of people fired from public office after a 2016 failed coup.

The pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) had demanded the ban be annulled because the same electoral authority already allowed the candidates to run in the March 31 election.

Anadolu said the demand for the six districts in the predominantly Kurdish southeast had been rejected, which means the second place candidate takes up the post. In some of the districts it will be a candidate from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling AKP.

A HDP source confirmed the decision to AFP and said the party could not appeal. It had called the measure a blow to Turkish democracy.

Erdogan’s AKP won most seats nationwide in the municipal election, but in a setback lost the capital Ankara and Istanbul, the country’s largest city and its economic hub.

Erdogan has often accused the HDP of ties with PKK Kurdish militants fighting a decades-long insurgency against the state, a charge the party denies.

Hundreds of HDP members and around 40 of its mayors are currently in detention, accused by authorities of ties to the PKK, listed as a terrorist organisation by Turkey and its Western allies.

The ban on the candidates is related to a decree to fire or suspend more than 140,000 people from the civil service or public institutions after the 2016 failed overthrow of Erdogan.

Ankara blames the coup attempt on US-based Muslim preacher Fethullah Gulen. Gulen denies Ankara’s accusations.

The majority of those sacked including teachers are accused of links to Gulen but several thousand are suspected of Kurdish militant links.

After the failed coup, the government installed local administrators to replace 95 of the 102 municipalities held by pro-Kurdish mayors elected in 2014.