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ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Running against six men to become the chieftain of a village in Hakkari province (Colemerg), female candidate Aycan Canan goes from door to door in her Kurdish clothing, despite the bad weather, in hopes to garner votes and support ahead of the upcoming local elections at the end of this month.
On March 31, voters across Turkey will elect mayors for 30 metropolitan cities, 51 conurbation cities, 1,000 districts, 20,735 municipality council members, and chieftains for 50,229 villages.
Canan, running in her village of Befrican, Gever, says male chieftains have represented the village for the past five decades and she believes the time has come for a woman to take charge.
"When I go to households, the men are surprisingly asking me whether I could visit male funerals because in our village only the men go to funerals," Canan said. "I tell them that I will take women with me for funerals and I will go with them…”
"For 50 years, men have always been the head of our village, so I said that this time I should give a different look to the elections."
Canan says she is running on an election platform promoting water supply to her village and improving the roads and infrastructure.
She boasts of a strong fan base among female voters in her village and is confident she will win against her male rivals.
"We want her to serve us. Women always ask for services. A woman helps a woman. I hope she will help us too," Turkman Barut, a villager, told Rudaw.
"We want our leader to be a woman. We want her to serve us. We suffer from many shortcomings. We do not have roads and water. It should not always be men, but this time our chieftain will be a woman,” Sabriye Guclu, another female villager, said.
Four women across the Hakkari province have fielded candidacies with Canan running to represent Gever district, two women running to represent Shamzinan district, and a fourth one running to represent Rubaroc town.
Turkey’s local elections are set to take place on March 31, as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP aims to reclaim the municipalities of the country’s largest provinces of Istanbul and Ankara from the CHP.
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