Turkey's pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) co-chair on Tuesday said his party will not name a candidate for the Istanbul election rerun, adopting the same strategy as the March 31 polls, which meant Kurdish voters could cast their ballots in favour of the main opposition candidate.

"We implemented a strategy on March 31and we reversed the path of politics," Sezai Temelli said in his party's group meeting at the parliament. "We struggled to lead peace that Turkey missed. We will do as same as we did yesterday."

Temelli also defined Turkey's Supreme Election Council (YSK) as "Supreme Fraud Council," underlining that the public will and the future of the people had been seized by the country's top electoral board and the HDP would not concede the public will to the ruling party.

The YSK late on Monday upheld an appeal by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) citing irregularities in the March 31 polls and ordered a rerun on June 23. Opposition candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu scored a narrow victory at the polls to run the municipality of the country’s biggest city and financial hub.

In the March 31 elections, the HDP mainly nominated candidates in south-eastern cities where Kurdish voters are in the majority, sitting out on three major cities for a de-facto alliance with the main opposition.

The party won 102 district and metropolitan city municipalities in the 2014 local elections. However, following military operations in the country’s Kurdish-majority southeastern cities in 2015, Turkish authorities dismissed 95 elected HDP mayors over terrorism charges, replacing them with appointed administrators.