Toward Kurdish Distinctiveness in Electoral Politics: The 1977 Local Elections in Di̇yarbakir

In December 1977 an independent candidate named Mehdi Zana was elected mayor of Diyarbakır, one of the biggest cities in Turkey's southeastern region. His election was a striking event, upsetting the troika of class, party, and state that had maintained a tight hold over the local political apparatus in Diyarbakır since the 1940s. Unlike most prior mayors of Diyarbakır, Zana did not come from a prominent family of local notables but was a working-class tailor with a middle-school education. He was one of only two independent candidates who won electoral contests in Turkey's sixty-seven big-city races; his election therefore flew in the face of a national trend that favored candidates from the country's two main political parties. Zana was well known for his left-wing, Kurdist politics, and at the time of his election he already had spent several years in jail for his activism. In a system that suppressed collective expressions of Kurdish identity, he was thus a clear ideological interloper.