Mehmet Ufuk Uras (Turkish pronunciation: [uˈfuk uˈɾas]; born January 4, 1959, in Üsküdar, Istanbul, Turkey) is a Turkish left-libertarian politician and economist.
Uras graduated from the Faculty of Economics of Istanbul University and began working as an academician at the same institution. A former leader of the now-defunct University Lecturers' Union (Öğretim Elemanları Sendikası), he was elected the chairman of Freedom and Solidarity Party (ÖDP) in 1996. Uras resigned from the leadership after the 2002 general election. He became the party chairman again in 2007.
Uras ran a successful campaign as an independent and a "common candidate of the Left" within the Thousand Hopes alliance,[1] backed by Kurdish-based Democratic Society Party and several left-wing, environmentalist and pro-peace groups in the 2007 general election, polling 81,486 votes, which is approximately 4 per cent of the vote in his constituency.[2] After having elected as an independent to the parliament he rejoined the ÖDP.[1] Therefore his parliamentary seat was the product of the alliance between the libertarian left and the Kurdish freedom movement in Turkey.
He was removed from his post as the ÖDP party leader in 2009, when his opponent Hayri Kozanoğlu was elected. He resigned from the Freedom and Solidarity Party on 19 June 2009.[3]
After the Democratic Society Party was dissolved in December 2009 and two of its MPs were banned from politics for five years, he joined forces with the remaining Kurdish MPs in the Peace and Democracy Party group, giving them the twenty seats necessary to retain their position as a parliamentary party. [4]
Uras did not run in the 2011 general election. On 25 November 2012, he became a co-founder and member of Greens and the Left Party of the Future, founded as a merger of the Greens and the Equality and Democracy Party.
Uras is married to ballet dancer and choreographer Zeynep Tanbay. Uras has a son named Deniz from a former marriage.
