Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the PKK, reportedly told a visiting DEM Party delegation on July 6, 2025 that Selahattin Demirtaş’s 2015 refrain—“We won’t make you president,” directed at Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—was strategically wrong and needlessly confrontational. The account, published by columnist Aytunç Erkin and relayed by multiple outlets, has not been accompanied by an official transcript from the İmralı meeting.
In those reports, Öcalan is quoted as saying he had no personal stake in whether Erdoğan became president and that the movement should have focused on broadening a democratic alliance and pursuing a “third path” rather than personalizing politics around a single leader. The remarks revisit one of the most memorable lines of Demirtaş’s March 17, 2015 group address, when he repeated the pledge three times from the parliamentary rostrum.
The fresh controversy has reignited a long-running dispute about the line’s origins. One narrative, voiced in 2023 by PKK commander Murat Karayılan, alleges that Ankara viewed the slogan as an idea attributed to Osman Kavala, said to have encouraged Demirtaş to deliver it in parliament. Supporters of this version argue that the episode helps explain why Erdoğan kept both figures in his sights in subsequent years.
Some commentators extend that account by pointing to earlier channels between Kavala and Kurdish interlocutors. In the leaked 2013 İmralı notes, HDP’s Sırrı Süreyya Önder conveyed Kavala’s “greetings” to Öcalan and relayed civil-society concerns about a prospective presidential system—evidence, they say, of an established line of communication through Önder that could have later carried strategic messaging to Demirtaş. (Kavala later clarified that Önder’s wording in those notes did not reflect his own phrasing and that his name appeared because he had written to Demirtaş ahead of İmralı contacts.)
Kavala, however, has explicitly denied conceiving the 2015 slogan. In an interview in April 2023, he said he had no role in HDP’s campaign and that the “copyright” for the phrase belongs to Sırrı Süreyya Önder—a denial echoed across several outlets at the time. That counter-claim remains the clearest on-record account regarding authorship.
As with Öcalan’s reported remarks, none of these competing accounts has been corroborated by an official document, and the principals have offered differing recollections. What is clear is that Demirtaş’s one-sentence speech—“We won’t make you president”—continues to shape the narratives around the collapse of the 2013–2015 peace process and the current recalibration efforts now being reported from İmralı.
