Communist Party of Turkey calls for supporting independent candidates at parliamentary elections

Communist Party of Turkey declares the establishment of 'Platform: This Social Order Must Change' that will organize independent candidates for parliamentary voting while calling on the people for 'spoilt' votes for presidential polls at snap elections on June 24
People hold a banner reads "We will change this social order"
Thursday, 10 May 2018 20:00

The Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) has released a statement on May 10 regarding the party’s approach to the upcoming elections, calling on the people to support independent candidates at parliamentary voting under the ‘Platform: This Social Order Must Change’. 

“Let’s stand against this social order with independent candidates,” the statement says, announcing the establishment of a platform ‘This Social Order Must Change’ that will organise the electoral works of the communists.

TKP: THIS SOCIAL ORDER MUST CHANGE

Indicating to the role of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP), the TKP says, “Our people are searching for the ways of getting rid of the reactionary government that has left 15 years behind” in power.

The TKP has underlined that Erdoğan’s AKP party was established as a common project of big capitalists and imperialist centres, leading to matchless damage and destruction on the working people in the modern history of Turkey.

“The Communist Party of Turkey will not allow the order, which created the darkness, to appear again with its own alternatives before this darkness,” the statement notes, adding that the communists would not approve the sliding of millions of workers into the vicious cycle of the capitalist order.

Declaring that the party is always at the front of the struggle against the reactionary order, the TKP’s statement says that the communists are waging an organized struggle everywhere; at factories where workers resist for protecting their rights to strike, at universities where students and academics resist against capitalist plundering, and at state schools which the government tries to turn into Islamic imam-hatip schools...   

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“The Communist Party of Turkey declared from the very beginning that it would not leave the working people alone with the order’s games at the June 24 polls,” the statement says, emphasising that the party will present an alternative for the working people at the parliamentary election, too.

“The unlawful prevention of the YSK [Turkey’s Supreme Election Council] is not an impossibility but a new challenge,” the TKP says, referring to the electoral council’s decision to reject the communist party’s participation in the elections with its name and emblem.

Following the electoral council’s unlawful decision, the TKP has decided to represent the working people with independent communist candidates at the upcoming parliamentary election. “Our works will be organised with a movement launched under the name of the ’Platform: This Social Order Must Change’.”

The TKP declares that it will expand the organised struggle with independent candidates with the participation of the people, raising the voice of the working class around the country. The communist party has also addressed the people, reminding its call for ‘spoilt’ votes for the presidential election that will be voted along with the parliamentary election in the same day.

“Standing against the social order and its unprincipled representatives, the Communist Party of Turkey calls for rejecting all the ‘one-man’ candidates with spoilt votes,” the TKP has said, calling on the intellectuals in favour of the workers and labour and the pro-people progressive youth to support the communist party’s struggle.

The TKP concludes the statement by declaring the platform’s list of independent candidates who will participate in the parliamentary voting in 17 electoral areas, the country’s most populated and industrial provinces such as İstanbul, Ankara, İzmir, Bursa, Adana, Antalya, Konya, Kocaeli and Diyarbakır.