Erdogan’s attack is the latest iteration of repressive, and at times genocidal, anti-Kurdish policies that go back to the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923. The banning of the HDP will mark the transition of Turkey to outright dictatorship. Not coincidentally, Turkey has also just quit the Istanbul Convention on violence against women — this, as the writer Elif Shafak warns “in a country where three women are killed daily and femicide is a huge crisis". The HDP’s strong pro-feminism contrasts starkly with Erdogan’s crude misogynism. HDP MP Omer Faruk Gergerlioglu was stripped of his parliamentary immunity on March 17 and given a one-year prison sentence for a social media post he made five years ago. The party’s imprisoned co-leaders, Leyla Guven and Selahattin Demirtas, are facing decades behind bars — Demirtas up to 132 years.