Turkey: Opposition head HDP to pass polls threshold

Pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party (HDP) will surpass the 10-percent threshold in Turkey’s June 7 general election, the main opposition leader has said.

During a live radio broadcast on Thursday, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), said, "The HDP gets most of their votes from AK Party voters. Will the HDP surpass the threshold? The polls suggest so; they will."

Kilicdaroglu refuted some Turkish media organizations whom he said were trying to spread the perception that the HDP would reduce CHP votes.

"We will see from whom they will get their votes; it will be from AK Party," Kilicdaroglu claimed. "Our party base is against the PKK, Abdullah Ocalan, Qandil, violence and oppression."

Clashes between Turkish forces and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), headed by jailed Abdullah Ocalan, have claimed the lives of more than 40,000 people in Turkey. The PKK, which is listed as a terrorist group by Turkey, the U.S. and the EU, is mainly based around the Qandil Mountains in northern Iraq.

The HDP is standing as a party for the first time in a general election, seeking to pass the 10 percent threshold that will allow it to gain seats in the Grand National Assembly.

The party currently has lawmakers who stood as independents in the 2011 election and joined the party after being elected.

One of the biggest highlights of the election is that if the party passes the electoral threshold, it will be able to win at least 50 to 60 seats, which will be seats lost for the largest party in their constituencies.

- Intel trucks 'story'

The CHP’s leader also talked about the images published last week purporting to show arms being carried to Syria by the Turkish intelligence service.

"If the footages are freshly obtained, then it is a story," Kilicdaroglu said. "If the journalists have been holding the footages for a long time and released it with 5 days to go for the elections, it is not right."

Turkey’s president Tuesday lodged a criminal complaint against the editor-in-chief of a newspaper that carried the images and video in question.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s lawyer brought legal action against Can Dundar, whose Cumhuriyet newspaper alleged on Friday that Turkey’s MIT intelligence agency was ferrying arms to rebels in Syria under the front-page headline "Here are the arms Erdogan says there were not".

In the complaint, handed to the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor's Office by Erdogan's lawyer Muammer Cemiloglu, Dundar is accused of committing a crime by publishing "false footage and information" in an attempt to bring down the Republic of Turkey and prevent the state from carrying out its duties.

Cumhuriyet’s story was related to the stopping of MIT trucks by gendarmerie teams in southern Adana and Hatay provinces in January 2014.

Photographs and video appeared to show crates filled with weapons and ammunition stacked under boxes containing medical supplies. In one photograph, the arms’ serial numbers are visible.