The Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) will embrace all parts of society in a possible alliance with the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) in the upcoming elections and categorizing Turkish voters into different ethnicities is against the constitution, MHP Deputy Chairman Semih Yalçın said Sunday.
Releasing a written statement in response to allegations that the MHP would be a liability to the AK Party in the south eastern and eastern parts of Turkey in the case of an alliance, Yalçın said that his party would address all of society.
"The constructive and unifying function which the MHP is performing has multiple meanings," the MHP deputy chair said.
Stressing that all elements of the Turkish public live in harmony across the country, he added, "It is another crypto version of the MHP enmity to create a political perception over the Kurdish electorate in order to hurt the alliance of the people, which is a result of the search for the national agreement."
Yalçın also underlined that categorizing Turkish voters as Kurds, Circassians, Roman and Laz was against the constitution and laws.
"The name of all of our citizens in the electoral literature is the Turkish electorate. Turkish electoral reality does not mean the denial of a citizen of any ethnic origin or descent. The guarantee for their existence is indeed norm of Turkish citizenship," he said.
Last week, MHP Chairman Devlet Bahçeli announced that his party would not nominate a candidate for the 2019 elections and instead would support Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who will be running for the AK Party.
Bahçeli said that the underlying reason for this decision is that his party would act in accordance with the Yenikapı spirit, referring to the rally that took place in Istanbul on Aug. 7, 2017 with the participation all of Turkey's main political leaders. That was considered a symbol of political consensus following the July 15, 2016 failed coup.
Within this framework, the two parties will discuss the details of the alliance in a joint committee. AK Party spokesman Mahir Ünal, Justice Minister Abdülhamit Gül and Constitutional Committee head Mustafa Şentop have been named as AK Party representatives for the alliance committee, while the MHP named deputies Mehmet Parsak, Mustafa Kalaycı and Faruk Aksu.
The AK Party and MHP will work on the details of the alliance.
Reportedly, political parties need to inform the top election board about which party they would form an alliance with before the elections.
The parties would also determine which party would nominate a candidate for each province. On the ballots, the simplest model would reportedly be picked.
Allied parties will be separate on ballots, but votes for the parties would be counted jointly. Allied parties would also be able to jointly prepare and publicly announce their election declarations.
The two parties had previously campaigned for the April 16 constitutional referendum in a joint bid to pass reforms which, above all, included the executive presidential system.