Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish party, its allies call on voters to back Erdogan’s rival

Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish party and its leftist allies called on voters Friday to back President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s main rival in the May 14 polls.
The announcement pushes one of Turkey’s largest voting blocs behind opposition candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu and further complicates Erdogan’s path to a third decade of rule.
The Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) – the third-largest in Turkey’s parliament – decided last month not to field a presidential candidate.
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It then strongly hinted that it backed Kilicdaroglu but never officially supported his candidacy.
But both the party’s co-leader and its leftist electoral alliance issued statements Friday calling on voters to rally around the most likely man to beat Erdogan.
“In this historic election, we call on the peoples of Turkey to vote for the Labor and Freedom Alliance in the parliamentary elections and for Kemal Kilicdaroglu in the presidential elections,” the HDP and its allies said in a statement.
HDP co-leader Mithat Sancar called the upcoming vote “the most crucial in Turkey's history.”
“That’s why we’ve decided to support Kilicdaroglu,” he told the Sozcu news site.
The HDP won more than 10 percent of the vote in past national elections and represents a community accounting for about a fifth of Turkey’s population.
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