According to results of the 7 June elections the HDP will enter parliament with nearly 13 percent of the vote.
First of all this is a fantastic political success.
This is a tremendous victory for all oppressed, excluded and ignored people.
The most important result of the elections was that the HDP literally blasted through the 10% threshold, smashing the racist mentality of the 12 September 1980 coup.
The second result was the unparalleled defeat of the ruling party. True, the AKP is again the leading party, but it lost nearly 15% compared to the 2011 elections.
Erdogan's presidential dreams are in tatters.
The AKP took a very heavy defeat as a result of its arrogance, its conservatism, its restrictions, its corruption, its police orders for assassinations, its neoliberalism that killed 301 miners in Soma, the deaths at Roboski, its jeers at Berkin Elvan's mother, its ending of the solution process, its statements that "there is no Kurdish problem", its brutal attacks of the Gezi resistance, Erdoğan's contamination with corruption, its restrictions on civil liberties like the Homeland Security Package, its release of the military officials convicted at Ergenekon, its efforts to change legal rulings to serve its own interests and its wide use of hate speech.
The elections show how detached the conservative, arrogant and pigheaded AKP leadership is from its base. And this break will without a doubt speed up.
7 June is the day that we witnessed not only the decline of the AKP throughout Turkey, but also it being wiped out in Kurdistan. Erdoğan, who disrupted the peace process because of his presidential ambitions, is not only responsible for the tensions in the elections, he is primarily responsible for the AKP's defeat. Like the section of AKP voting workers in the west of the country who broke from the AKP, the masses in Kurdistan who had illusions in the AKP have also begun to break away.
We can be sure that this break will continue to speed up.
Erdoğan was saying the parliamentary system was in the waiting room. He went around from town to town commiting a crime by supporting the AKP as the President. Now Erdoğan's dreams aren't even in the waiting room, they are in the freezer. Instead the HDP's desire for equality, justice and most importantly peace has proven to be so strong it has smashed through the threshold and entered parliament.
At the same time this is a victory for the Kurdish Freedom Movement and Abdullah Ocalan who has made a major contribution to the normalisation of politics by beginning the peace process. This movement that was repeatedly attacked during the election campaign and despite Erdoğan's insults, didn't end in conflict. The peaceful democratic process continued without interruption.
The HDP has won a major success by on the one hand being the party of peace and on the other by proving that it is Erdoğan and the AKP using the language of hate and conflict. The entry of Abdullah Ocalan's comrades to the centre of politics in Turkey despite the existence of racism, nationalism and state tradition is a major defeat for the ruling classes.
Other election results are those of the CHP. The CHP could not avoid the inevitable crisis. That the main opposition party has stagnated when the ruling party has lost so many votes exposes just how shallow its political campaign was in avoiding the main political debates in Turkey. The CHP leadership should resign immediately.
The one negative result of the elections is the increase in votes for the fascist MHP. And with this jump in its votes, we need to be vigilant against the likely possibility of the MHP becoming a coalition partner.
In the coming period we can all expect political instability. But we go into these unstable conditions more confident, more hopeful and with more power to win. The ruling class, however, will face this period with cracks, political divisions and insecurity. The AKP is expecting great crisis. The CHP is expecting a great crisis. All ruling class parties can expect crisis on forming the next government.
We have great hope. Now is the time to enjoy this victory. Now, in the year of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide we have our party in parliament saying, "We recognise the genocide"..." and we are in a situation where we have recieved over 6 million votes.
We are confident.
Now we are much stronger to fight against workplace deaths and murders of women, and to defend the solution process, the peace process, the right to strike, a living wage, the right to unionise and the brotherhood of people.
Those who set the bombs at the HDP rally in Diyarbakir, those who defend those bombs and those who created the climate for the explosion of those bombs, they have lost.
Those who fought on despite the humiliation, violence, attacks and bombs, and those who favour brotherhood on equal terms, they won.
We have a message for Erdoğan, who this time can't go out on the balcony: Now it's our time to speak! And this is just the beginning!
Meltem Oral-Şenol Karakaş
Joint spokespersons for DSIP
8th of June, 2015
(Translated to English by Carol Williams)
