The one minute, 39 seconds-long video was recorded during a June 9 meeting of the ruling Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) neighborhood heads at the party headquarters, Hurriyet daily reported.
Although the meeting was closed to the public, the AKP’s Topselvi neighborhood head Ahmet Ozturk reportedly shared the video on his own Facebook account.
Ozturk later deleted the post but the video had already gone viral.
“Friends, our party organization must conduct very different work on the HDP. I can’t speak these words outside [publicly]. I am speaking them with you here. Why? Because if the HDP falls below the election threshold it would mean that we would be in a much better place,” Erdogan is heard saying in the video, before telling his party cadres to put “tight marking” on the voters in each district.
“You know who is who ... If our neighborhood representatives do not know who is who, then they should resign. You will take the voter lists for each ballot box and conduct special work,” he adds.
In another video from the same meeting, Erdogan could be seen telling party representatives to secure AKP majorities on ballot box monitoring committees in order to “finish the job in Istanbul before it has even started."
"We shouldn't repeat the experience of June 7," Erdogan also warned, referring to the 2015 election that the AKP lost its parliamentary majority.
Every party must pass the 10 percent threshold in order to enter parliament.
The HDP slammed Erdogan over the leaked video.
“AKP chairman Erdogan openly incites people to commit crime. He plans to steal our votes by cheating and pressure to bring us below the election threshold,” the HDP’s official Twitter account stated on June 14.
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