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

Selahattin Demirtaş lit up the Turkish left in 2014, but was imprisoned for ‘terrorist propaganda’. His freedom would mark a new political era

A 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.

That month, June 2015, was the peak of democratic optimism in Turkey this century. By the end of the summer, Turkish democracy began to shrink slowly – and then all at once. Demirtaş was jailed the following year, on charges relating to alleged “terrorist propaganda”. As of this month, he will have spent a decade in Edirne F-type high-security prison, in north-western Turkey.

In those 10 years, Demirtaş, now 53, has written seven books. I read them obsessively. As a novelist, critic and democratic socialist, I found they helped me maintain a connection to my favourite politician. In 2017, Demirtaş published his debut, Dawn, a short-story collection (Sarah Jessica Parker put out a US edition in 2019). It sold 100,000 copies in 20 days. In a 2023 interview, Demirtaş told me his new vocation was a “different method of resistance against oppression”. That same year, he announced he was giving up active politics. He told me his wife, Başak, convinced him to write fiction, and dedicated Dawn’s stories of misogyny to “all women who have been murdered or [been] victims of violence”.

Demirtaş was a casualty of Middle Eastern geopolitics in the mid-2010s. Months before his arrest, he had urged Turkish officials to open a corridor for the passage of aid to Kurdish fighters battling Islamic State militants in Kobani, a northern Syrian town run autonomously by Kurds. Ankara refused, fearing an independent Kurdish state on its eastern border. This led Demirtaş to call on “our peoples to take to the streets – and to support those already on the streets”. In the ensuing protests in October 2014, more than 40 people died. The unrest in Syria helped the AKP win back some of the votes it had lost in the 2015 elections. By that autumn, the party had regained its parliamentary majority. Demirtaş was eventually sentenced to 42 years in total for charges including disrupting state unity, inciting crime and making terrorist propaganda linked to the 2014 Kobani protests. He was acquitted of charges of homicide, concerning the individuals killed during the unrest. Progressives such as me felt that Demirtaş’s eco-socialist promise for a new democratic Turkey was buried for good.

Then, in December 2024, Bashar al-Assad’s regime fell to Turkish-backed Syrian Arab opposition fighters, and everything changed. The new context across the Syrian border led the Turkish state to start a peace process with its Kurdish minority. Nationalist leader Devlet Bahçeli shook hands with members of Demirtaş’s party for the first time. Following peace talks, in July 2025, the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) held a symbolic weapon-burning ceremony. This August, the Turkish parliament passed a law establishing a legal framework for the dissolution of the PKK. This created a pathway for the reintegration of PKK members into Turkish society, suspending prison sentences for some and allowing thousands of exiled Kurds affiliated with the PKK to return. Yet Demirtaş remained in jail.

In November 2025, a landmark ruling by the European court of human rights (ECHR) reignited expectations of his release. Rejecting Turkey’s appeal against its original judgment in July 2025, the ECHR found Demirtaş’s imprisonment to be politically motivated, noting that “the true purpose was to stifle pluralism and limit democratic debate”.

The leaders of Turkey’s ruling coalition, Erdoğan and Bahçeli, didn’t seem to object. When asked about the ruling, Erdoğan said: “We’ll comply with whatever the judiciary says.” Bahçeli went further, saying his release would be “beneficial for Turkey”. On his X account, Demirtaş sincerely thanked Bahçeli, who, he said, “has bravely broken taboos today and shown that peace cannot be built by surrendering to fear”.

Demirtaş’s wife, Başak, has visited him every week for the past decade, travelling from their family home in Diyarbakır to Edirne: a 1,686km (1,050-mile) journey from eastern Turkey to the western border. She reportedly rented a room in a nearby Edirne hotel after rumours of her husband’s release. But local Turkish courts refused to implement the ECHR’s decision and, four days later, Demirtaş asked his wife to return home to Diyarbakır.

Hope remains alive for his freedom. Demirtaş has supported the Kurdish peace process from the start, and most party leaders in Turkey have spoken on his behalf. Bahçeli said in August: “Demirtaş should return home,” and revealed he remains in regular contact through his lawyers. Demirtaş’s warm and witty, social-media-friendly political style is gaining traction and boosting the left worldwide: you can see its like in Zohran Mamdani in New York and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan.

In June, two Kurdish politicians shared photos of Demirtaş after visiting him in Edirne prison. Wearing a blue shirt and a grey jacket, he looked older, wiser and calmer. Perhaps he’s working on a new book. Demirtaş’s struggle for a democratic Turkey turned him not into the nation’s leader, but one of its most productive authors. Granting him the freedom he is overdue would let him continue pushing back against oppression, perhaps in a new way altogether.

Kaya Genç is a novelist and essayist from Istanbul, and the author of The Lion and the Nightingale: A Journey Through Modern Turkey