Turkish political party in Greece vows to address minority's issues

The head of a Greek political party, founded by the country's 150,000-strong Turkish minority, has announced that they are competing in the current elections to seek solutions to the minority's problems in the European Parliament.

Friendship, Equality and Peace Party (DEB) chair Cigdem Asafoglu said their decision to compete in the European elections has to do with the attitude of most Greek political parties towards Turks in Greece, which is generally ignorant or discriminatory.

"They even don't accept our identity as a Turkish-Muslim minority, so they can’t develop solutions to the problems of the minority," she stressed.

Saying that the DEB was the strongest party in the provinces of Rodop (Rodophe) and Xhanti (Iskece) in Western Thrace in the 2014 and 2019 European elections, Asafoglu said: "In the current elections, we will emphasise that the minority in the Western Thrace is Turkish."

"Our party is working to draw attention and develop solutions for the minority's pressing problems, including education and the denial of their ethnic identity by Greek authorities,” she added.

Discriminatory practices

The Western Thrace region – located near Greece's northeastern border with Türkiye – is home to a substantial, long-established Turkish minority numbering around 150,000.

For decades, Athens has carried out discriminatory practices against the local Turkish community, including preventing them from using the words "Turk" or "Turkish" in the names of their foundations, barring them from electing their own religious representatives, and shutting down their schools.

The rights of the Turks of Western Thrace were guaranteed under the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. But since then, the situation has seriously deteriorated, with Greece refusing to carry out rulings by the European Court of Human Rights.

Türkiye has long criticized Greece for depriving the Muslim Turkish minority of their basic rights and freedoms.