Labor Party of Turkey (EMEP) election statement: United people's struggle will overthrow the one-man regime
Fight Back News Service is circulating the Labor Party of Turkey (EMEP) statement on the presidential and parliamentary elections held on May 14.
Despite the ruling party's use of state facilities and resources to implement all kinds of restrictions, provocations, censorship and threats against its opponents, the result of the presidential and parliamentary elections was a decline in the mass support of the one-man regime and the AKP's loss of power in parliament.
The AKP did not refrain from terrorizing the environment by recalling at every opportunity the methods of violence used between the 7 June and 1 November elections in 2015, using their connotations as election material, and fueling rumors that para-military groups would take to the streets. It has provoked the prejudices of the people in the pool media by embracing the most reactionary vein coming from the National Vision with sects and communities, with parties such as Hüda Par, the extension of the contra tradition; it has tried to expand the boundaries of a racist-chauvinist political ground. The fact that Hüda Par, The New Welfare Party (YRP) sent deputies to the parliament, that the MHP increased its vote – at a rate unexpected from itself – and that the centrifugal and, so to speak, more radical tendencies outside the nationalist-conservative vein, of which the People's Alliance is the main axis, have been drawn into the orbit of this alliance and protect it.
Unable to stop its own decline despite the increase in its allies and the contribution of its distant support, the AKP made a special effort to ensure that the presidential elections went to a second round. The interventions on the election results took place in full view of everyone. The AKP, which tried to gain time even with methods that strained the patience and physical endurance of observers and other officials by having the minutes counted again and again, still could not hide the altitude lost by the one-man regime.
The Labor and Freedom Alliance, including our party, entered the elections under extraordinarily difficult conditions. Despite the threat of the HDP's closure, the arrest of politicians and journalists, the pressure on voters, armed demonstrations and attacks on election day, the Labor and Freedom Alliance completed the process more or less preserving the number of deputies it sent to parliament, even though it could not increase the number of deputies it sent to parliament.
Various reasons for the failure of the one-man regime to be defeated in the first round will undoubtedly be discussed. The main reason that needs to be underlined is that a united struggle that directly organizes the workers and the oppressed around their own problems could not be formed at the national level. The gap arising from this organizational weakness of the working class and laborer’s was filled by parties provoking reactionary sensitivities. This situation has once again repeated the old experience that the reactionary prejudices of the poor, unemployed, precarious and unorganized masses can be mobilized. This explains the partial increase in the votes of the old and new allies of the AKP.
However, the parliamentary picture that has emerged is not merely a change in the arithmetic redistribution of the power that is dragging the country further and further into darkness.
Our party sent two MPs to the parliament from the list of the Green Left Party as representatives of the workers and laborer’s. Together with the other MPs of our alliance, our friends who entered the parliament from the Green Left Party lists will fight against anti-people and anti-laborer policies, capitalist politics, anti-democratic practices against women, Kurds and immigrants.
Our party will make a broader evaluation of the 2023 elections after the evaluations to be made both in its own boards and in the Labor and Freedom Alliance.
A new period of struggle is now opening before us. The result that our people, who express their tendency for change in one way or another, put before us with their votes is to transform this tendency into a power that can overthrow the one-man regime. This responsibility lies with the forces of labor and democracy.
Our party calls on all laborer’s to mobilize in order to overthrow the one-man regime, which was weakened in this election, in the second round.”