The June 7, 2015, general election in Turkey saw the left Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) win almost 13 percent of the vote and around eighty parliamentary seats. It passed the 10 percent threshold for parliamentary representation for the first time, with a total of almost six million votes.

The HDP captured all the seats in the following Kurdish cities: Batman, Agri Dersim, Hakari, Sirnak, and Igdir. The party won one million votes and eleven seats in Istanbul — a city with a huge Kurdish population although the party also won significant non-Kurdish support there.

Thirty-one of the HDP’s eighty new members of parliament are women, the highest proportion of any party. HDP candidates included Armenians, Yezidis, and Assyrians alongside Kurds. The HDP had the only openly gay candidate.