“The Turkmen Front will work to make the Turkmen language an official language,” Aydin Maruf, who leads his party’s electoral list, said in a press conference in Erbil.
“Turkmens are the second main component in this region and our demands have previously been in this direction,” added Maruf, who is also the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) minister of state for minorities affairs.
Education is also central to the party’s campaign platform. Maruf said they want to see the histories of Turkmen, Chaldean, and Assyrian minorities studied in schools.
“We continue to work towards ensuring that students from these communities learn their own history as part of their curriculum in the Kurdistan Region,” he said.
Muna Kahveci, a candidate for the Turkmen Reform Party and former deputy speaker of the legislature, said in a press conference in Erbil that she is running to return to the parliament as the “real representative of the Turkmens.”
“I swear that once again we will struggle for the constitution … and our [Turkmen] official language will be written inside all the institutions of the Kurdistan Region,” she said.
Two of the parliament’s 100 seats are reserved for the Turkmens. One of them is located in Erbil and Kahveci is vying for it. Maruf's Iraqi Turkmen Front is competing under the general seats.
Kahveci said she will work to increase the number of quota seats.
There were 11 quota seats in the Kurdistan Region’s parliament reserved for ethnic and religious minorities, but the Baghdad-based Federal Supreme Court in February ruled that they were unconstitutional, effectively eliminating them.
The ruling was slammed by the minority parties as it makes it almost impossible for them to have representatives in the parliament and raised questions about whether the minorities would even participate in the vote.
In May, Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council reinstated five quota seats for Turkmen, Chaldean, and Assyrian minorities - two in Sulaimani province, two in Erbil, and one seat in Duhok.
