ANKARA, Turkey – Pro-Kurdish candidates nearly doubled their seats in Turkey’s national elections, making sure the autonomy-seeking minority’s demands for greater rights get heard loud and clear in the months to come.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling party was the big winner in the weekend ballot, taking 50 percent of the vote to give it an impressive mandate in its third straight term in power.
But the other story of the election was the strong gains made by Kurdish rights candidates, who needed to run as independents to get around rules requiring a party to get at least 10 percent of the vote to get into Parliament.
A total of 36 candidates backed by the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party won seats, a gain of 16 from the previous election.
Among them was Leyla Zana, a former lawmaker who spent 10 years in prison on charges of links to Kurdish rebels that she always denied. In 1991, Zana also caused an uproar for speaking Kurdish while taking the oath of office, in defiance of rules against use of the language in official settings.
Kurdish rebels, deemed terrorists by the government, have been fighting a decades-long battle for independence in Turkey’s northeast. More moderate Kurds
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