Even Erdoğan backs the release of Turkey’s brightest opposition leader. So why is he still in jail? | Kaya Genç

Selahattin Demirtaş lit up the Turkish left in 2014, but was imprisoned for ‘terrorist propaganda’. His freedom would mark a new political eraA decade and a half ago, a promising figure emerged on Turkey’s political scene: Selahattin Demirtaş. A tall, talented, human rights lawyer then still in his 30s, a founder of Amnesty’s Diyarbakır branch in eastern Turkey, he was adept at thinking on his feet. And could he talk. His witty satirical speeches, broadcast on the evening news, annoyed Turkey’s establishment politicians on the right and left alike.Demirtaş’s meteoric rise began in 2010, when he became the chair of Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish party, the Peace and Democracy party (BDP). I voted for Demirtaş in the 2014 presidential election, when he was 41. Despite his loss to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Demirtaş’s 9.7% vote share cheered up leftists such as me on what promised to be another sad election night. I voted for Demirtaş’s party again (since renamed the Peoples’ Democratic party, HDP) in the 2015 elections. That was a night to remember. Erdoğan’s Justice and Development party (AKP), which had governed since 2002, lost its parliamentary majority for the first time. Demirtaş and the HDP garnered 13.1% of the vote, a stunning result for an eco-socialist, feminist, pro-Kurdish movement. There was jubilation and partying in Cihangir, Istanbul’s bohemian heart. I celebrated into the wee hours alongside friends, convinced we would wake up to a new Turkey.Kaya Genç is a novelist and essayist from Istanbul, and the author of The Lion and the Nightingale: A Journey Through Modern Turkey Continue reading...