The Republican People’s Party (CHP) was able to win the mayoral election in Istanbul (31 March and 23 June 2019) and at the same time experienced how important cooperation with the Kurdish-progressive People`s Democratic Party (HDP) is to generate political strength.
It should be emphasized that the support of the HDP was decisive for the CHP's victory. Their support made CHP's victory possible in the first place because the HDP did not nominate its own candidates in major West Turkish cities in order to help CHP candidates win the elections. The party leadership called for CHP candidates to be elected. This ensured that Ekrem Imamoglu also received the votes of many Kurdish voters in Istanbul. Of approximately 4.6 million votes that Imamoglu received, 911,000 were HDP votes.
The struggle for Kurdish voters in the repeat of the mayoral election in Istanbul on 23 June 2019 was in full swing. Both the CHP and the ruling Party for Justice and Development (AKP) tried to win them over and payed particular attention to the non-voters (more than 1.5 million) and the Kurdish voters. The AKP was not focusing its strategy on large-scale rallies, but wanted to specifically solicit these votes on the ground, e.g. through home visits. In order to send a positive signal in the competition for Kurdish voters, the government abruptly lifted the eleven-year ban on visiting the lawyers of Abdullah Öcalan , leader of the banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and imprisoned since 1999, at the beginning of May. For the first time in eleven years, the lawyers visited Öcalan in early May 2019. Shortly before the elections on 23 June, the AKP government again drew the "Kurdish card": In order to influence the HDP voters, a statement by Öcalan was used as an excuse, in which he allegedly called on the Kurds to be neutral.
