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A women's rights activist brandishes a flag of the HDP, the pro-Kurdish movement, on September 1, 2019. Yasin AKGUL / AFP

In Turkey, the repression continues to hit the main pro-Kurdish party, the HDP. On Wednesday, 27 November, several members and party officials, including a former MP, were detained.

From our correspondent in Istanbul , Anne Andlauer

The main opposition parties, excluding HDP, remain relatively silent in the face of these arrests. On 26 November, three mayors of the HDP - three women elected last March and dismissed - were incarcerated, denounces an elected pro-Kurdish party.

In the past three months, the Turkish authorities have dismissed 24 of the 65 HDP mayors and imprisoned 18 of them on the pretext of links to terrorism. The two former party leaders, including the charismatic Selahattin Demirtas, have languished in prison for three years, like thousands of its activists.

►Also read: Turkey: Several pro-Kurdish mayors arrested for " terrorism "

The situation has become so untenable that the pro-Kurdish party last week called for early elections. This is a challenge to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but also to the other opposition parties. In the spring municipal elections, thanks to the tacit support of the HDP, which had not presented candidates in the western metropolises, the opposition had won in five of the six largest Turkish cities, including Istanbul.

Opposition Union

But the anti-Erdogan alliance has run out of steam, deplores Garo Paylan, HDP deputy of Diyarbakir. He recalls that his party was the only one to denounce Ankara's recent offensive against Kurdish forces in northeastern Syria.

" By joining forces, the opposition has achieved something very important and unprecedented in the last municipal elections. Thanks to this, we have deprived the power of almost all its big cities, he decrypts. Erdogan understood it very well and set himself the goal of breaking up this opposition bloc. This was the main goal of his latest offensive in Syria. Unfortunately, he succeeded, since all the other opposition parties in Parliament supported the war and moved away from the HDP. "

Thus, while the HDP lost more than a third of its mayors in three months, the reaction of the other opposition parties did not go beyond a few verbal protests.