Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has instructed his ruling AKP party’s local organizations to put "tight marking" on voters in order to bring the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) below the 10 percent threshold, a leaked video showed.
"Don't speak about this openly", Erdogan says, "Friends, our party organization must conduct very different work on the HDP. I won't speak about this outside," he tells his delegates.
"Why? Because if the HDP falls below the election threshold it would mean that we would be in a much better place," Erdoğan is heard saying in the video, before telling his party cadres to put "tight marking" on the voters in each district.
Every party must pass the 10 percent threshold in order to enter parliament.
"You know who is who ... If our neighbourhood representatives do not know who is who, then they should resign. You will take the voter lists for each ballot box and conduct special work," he adds.
The video was recorded during a June 9 meeting of the ruling Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) neighbourhood heads at the party headquarters.
Although the meeting was closed to the public, the AKP’s local head Ahmet Öztürk reportedly shared the video on his own Facebook account.
Öztürk later deleted the post but the video had already gone viral.
In another video from the same meeting, Erdoğan tells party representatives to secure AKP majorities on ballot box monitoring committees in order to "finish the job in Istanbul before it has even started."
"We shouldn't repeat the experience of June 7," Erdoğan also warned, referring to the 2015 election that the AKP lost its parliamentary majority.
