Gülcan Kaçmaz Sayyiğit, one of the candidates of the Green Left Party for Van province, is a former co-mayor dismissed by the government despite having been elected in elections. Sayyigit said that she would continue to work with her constituency.
The Green Left Party is gaining popularity in the province of Van. Gülcan Kaçmaz Sayyigit, one of the candidates of the Green Left Party for Van province, spoke to ANF.
Van is the largest city in the Serhat region of North Kurdistan. The city has a population of nearly 1.5 million and more than 700 thousand voters. The Green Left Party aims to win all 8 parliamentary seats. Every election campaign office opened in Van turns into a rally with the participation of thousands of citizens.
Sayyiğit said that bans and pressures have never made them take a step back, adding that she and her party would fight stronger for the solution to the Kurdish question, women's rights and the right to use mother language.
The YPS candidate stated: “I have strongly embraced the Kurdish struggle, the women's struggle, the struggle for the oppressed, nature, mother language, the struggle against isolation and the unlawfulness in prisons. The denial of my mandate after my election as a co-mayor did not cut me off from our people. We are with the people almost every day. We continue to work to represent their will. We will continue our work both inside the parliament and together with our people at the local level.”
WHO IS SAYYIGIT?
Gülcan Kaçmaz Sayyigit was born in Van’s Gevaş district in 1982. She completed primary, secondary and high school in Gevaş and graduated from Yüzüncü Yıl University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Department of Geography. Sayyigit, who holds a master’s degree in the same field, was appointed as a geography teacher in the Çatak district of Van in 2008, after which she was involved in union activities at Eğitim-Sen. She served as Eğitim-Sen Çatak Representative and Co-Chair of Eğitim-Sen Van Branch between 2014 and 2017. Sayyiğit was suspended from her duties in 2015 and dismissed by a governmental decree two days after she was reinstated in 2017. Sayyigit was elected as HDP Edremit co-mayor in the 2019 local elections. However, she was not granted her mandate on the grounds that she had been dismissed from office by a governmental decree. The Supreme Election Board (YSK) granted the mayorship to the AKP candidate who did not win the elections.
