Ali Atalan

Ali Atalan (born 5 January 1968) is a Kurdish-German politician of Yazidi faith. He is a former member of the Landtag of North Rhine-Westphalia with Die Linke in Germany, and the Turkish Parliament with the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP).

Early life and education Ali Atalan grew up in a Kurds-Yazidis family and came to Germany in 1985. After completing his Abitur in 1997, he studied political science and sociology at the Ruhr University Bochum, where he graduated in 2004 with a Diplom in social science.

A member of the Greens from 1998 until 2001, he became a member of the Left Party in Germany in 2001. In 2004, he became a member of the city council in Münster. In the 2010 state elections, he was eighth on the state list of Die Linke North Rhine-Westphalia. Between 2010 until 2012, he assumed a seat in the 15th Landtag of North Rhine-Westphalia.

On 7 April 2015, Atalan was nominated by the People's Democratic Party (HDP) to their electoral list for the upcoming parliamentary election to the Grand National Assembly. Along with fellow party member Feleknas Uca, he became the first ever Yazidi member of the Assembly. In the general elections of November 2015, he was again a candidate, but was not elected.

On 13 November 2015, after the resumption of the Kurdish-Turkish conflict, the town of Nusaybin was placed under a curfew by the Turkish authorities. Atalan and Gülser Yıldırım, a member of the Grand National Assembly, began a hunger strike in protest against the curfew. The State Prosecutor for the Court of Cassation in Turkey Bekir Şahin filed a lawsuit before the Constitutional Court on the 17 March 2021, demanding for Atalan and 686 further HDP politicians a five-year ban for a political participation. The lawsuit was filed jointly with a request for the HDP to be shut down due to the parties alleged organizational links with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).