For Communist Municipalities
To the press and the public,
The Communist Party of Turkey will stand on the ballot paper in the local elections to be held on March 31, 2024.
We will confront those who think that those who want a statist, secular and independent country have no choice in the local elections; those who are preparing to push the people in pursuit of fake solutions by exploiting the anti-AKP resistance in society once again; those who show market and rent relations as the inevitable fate of municipalities. We will confront them with a communist approach to municipalities.
The concept of municipality where money talks will be defeated
It is no secret; municipalities, which should be known for the welfare and happiness of the people, the egalitarian provision of basic rights and services, and the organized participation of citizens in governance, are instead known as hotbeds of rent, nepotism and bribery.
Municipal elections are taking place in an atmosphere marked by millions of liras paid to parties for candidacies from the smallest town to metropolitan cities, bargains during the process of nominating candidates, quests for alliances that are not based on any principle or program, transfers between parties and purchased candidates.
By strengthening a reliable, principled and organized alternative, we will show that we are not condemned to this style in approach to municipalities in which money has a say in both elections and administration.
We will push back the understanding of municipalities based on profiteering and spread the principles and examples of communist approach to municipalities against it.
TKP for communist municipalities
With this approach, the Communist Party of Turkey will nominate candidates for municipal councils all over the country.
We will act in line with the following basic criteria for mayoral candidacies to be nominated in certain places at the provincial, district and town level:
– The number of communist municipalities will increase, and the concept of honest, moral and consistent understanding of municipalities based on an egalitarian and statist approach will become widespread.
– The communist approach to municipalities will enter some localities for the first time, gain strength there and spread its roots.
– While we are faced with examples of failed municipalities that cannot be separated from each other regardless of which party they belong to, those who try to forget these experiences and spread false hopes with unprincipled and programless alliances will not be able to render people without a choice.
TKP is confident that the communist alternative will emerge stronger from the elections in line with these criteria. This claim is based on concrete targets that we will share with the public in the coming days in the mayoral and municipal council elections.
In the 2024 local elections, our Party, which will act with this independent approach, will not support the candidate of any bourgeois party for whatever reason.
We know that some of the quests for unprincipled alliances that are already on the agenda are justified by the concern of not leaving the municipalities to the AKP, and that the left is asked to line up behind the bourgeois opposition, based on this justification.
Moreover, it has only been a few months since the last electoral experience, which showed that unless there is a real reckoning with the AKP mentality that leans on marketism, NATOism and sectarianism, the AKP cannot be defeated, not even regressed…
While there is no meaningful answer to the question of what difference it makes whether the municipalities, which are completely dominated by market and rent relations, are in the hands of the government or the bourgeois opposition…
We challenge those who see the municipalities as a profit faucet that must be kept on top of, those who try to present themselves as hope again without ever discussing this and without taking into account the failed experiences of municipalism full of policies to the detriment of the people, those who want to take advantage of the despair that people are deliberately pushed into so that a real choice does not emerge.
Those who say “I am also for communist municipalities” will step forward
Months before the elections, when once again candidates, not programs, are being discussed, TKP’s priority is to confront the bourgeois politics based on individuals with candidates who will represent the organized power of the people. Those who want to take a step forward to create new examples where communist municipalism will be realized are applying for candidacy to TKP for this purpose in every corner of the country.
While the application and evaluation process continues, TKP is starting to organize meetings to respond to the growing interest in communist municipalism and to explain the principles of communist municipalism and how to implement it in more locations.
The Communist Party of Turkey has never hesitated to say that the social system it defends is a system that can only be the product of centralized planning. We need a centralized mobilization of all resources to build the country on independent, egalitarian, statist and secular foundations. Communist municipalities alone will not be enough to establish such an order, but examples of honest, participatory municipalities based on the benefit of the people, not profit, closed to rent-seeking, will strengthen the bond between us and such a country, shorten the distance, and show what can be done even with limited resources.
The meetings for communist municipalities, where all these will be discussed, will start in December with a public meeting in Kartal of Istanbul. The full meeting program will be shared with the public in the coming days.
TKP Central Committee