Legislative Period
On November 5, 2007, inclusion of the demand for autonomy in the six Kurdish provinces in the party program. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is accused of heading down a dead-end street by attempting to show Kurdish people as a minority group in Turkey which DTP claimed located in that region.
On November 11, 2007, leader Nurettin Demirtaş called on political party leaders to convene a "democracy summit". Demirtaş noted his party has the will and initiative to stop bloodshed in the country. They acted as an intermediary in the release of the eight abducted soldiers. DTP members have come under intense criticism after some party members shook hands with PKK leaders when they went to northern Iraq to mediate for the release of abducted Turkish soldiers. The DTP members did not sing Turkey's national anthem during the opening of a party conference.
The Democratic Society Party claimed that the 10% threshold of the national vote required in order to be represented in the Grand Assembly was aimed at disqualifying it from the parliament. However, many other parties failed to cross this threshold in the 2002 election. The Democratic Society Party decided to have its candidates run as Independents. On 13 May DTP announced that if they wanted to, they could lock up the elections by putting in five to ten thousand independent candidates. The next day in a statement, the Supreme Election Committee (Turkish: Yüksek Seçim Kurulu (YSK)) responded to DTP's threat by stating that there was no issue and that they would simply use "larger envelopes".
20 DTP affiliates running as independents were elected to the Grand National Assembly of Turkey:
- Batman: Ayla Akat Ata, Bengi Yıldız
- Bitlis: Mehmet Nezir Karabaş
- Diyarbakır: Aysel Tuğluk, Selahattin Demirtaş, Gültan Kışanak
- Hakkâri: Hamit Geylani
- Iğdır: Pervin Buldan
- Istanbul: Sebahat Tuncel
- Mardin: Ahmet Türk, Emine Ayna
- Muş: Sırrı Sakık, Nuri Yaman
- Siirt: Osman Özçelik
- Şanlıurfa: İbrahim Binici
- Şırnak: Sevahir Bayındır, Hasip Kaplan
- Tunceli: Şerafettin Halis
- Van: Fatma Kurtulan, Özdal Uçer
İstanbul deputy, Sebahat Tuncel, was under arrest when elected and being tried on charges of being a member of the PKK.
Hamit Geylani could not join the DTP parliamentarian group due to a former verdict of the Constitutional Court. Akın Birdal joined DTP to enable the party reach the 20 deputy threshold to form a group.
Eight of the newly elected deputies from the party are women. The female deputies (including İstanbul deputy Sebahat Tuncel) are:
| Name | Province |
|---|---|
| Aysel Tuğluk | Diyarbakır |
| Gültan Kışanak | Diyarbakır |
| Emine Ayna | Mardin |
| Sevahir Bayındır | Şırnak |
| Fatma Kurtulan | Van |
| Pervin Buldan | Iğdır |
| Ayla Akat Ata | Batman |
| Sebahat Tuncel | İstanbul |
Read more about this topic: Democratic Society Party
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