Pro-Kurdish party shakes up Turkish elections
Progressive group kicks aside taboos to win voters tired of rising authoritarianism
Since President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party came to power 12 years ago, Turkish elections have had all the excitement of a summer rerun.
But an unlikely event has put a spring in the step of jaded voters who cast their ballots Sunday: the sudden prominence of the progressive People’s Democratic Party (HDP) — a pro-Kurdish faction that is struggling to represent more than the 18 per cent of citizens who come from the marginalized, and once demonized, Kurdish minority.
“People are saying there’s something in the air,” says Henri Barkey of Lehigh University, speaking from Istanbul. “When you walk in the streets you can see they’re mobilized.
“This election is between Erdogan and the Kurds. Nobody talks about the other parties. Even though the HDP is a small party you’d think it was all about them.”
It’s quite an achievement for a party that has no official seats in parliament, only a bloc of 27 independent members. By running them under the HDP banner it is hoping to win the 10 per cent of the vote that is needed to enter parliament as a party and more than double its seats. But under the zero-sum Turkish system, if it falls short, all seats are lost.
“Turks have become used to singleparty government for the last three elections,” says Firat Cengiz of the University of Liverpool. “The ruling party has limited discourse, and it’s the same with the other opposition parties. But there’s a young, energetic population that has no political outlet. The HDP has an agenda that appeals to them.”
The sudden excitement mirrors the rise of the progressive, left-leaning Scottish National Party in Britain, she points out. But opponents say the HDP has as much chance of attracting mainstream voters as the IRA’s political wing Sinn Fein would in Britain. Too many Turks, they say, remember the bad old days of the 1980s and ’90s when the government purged southeastern Kurdish villages and the militant separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) killed thousands of Turkish troops and civilians.
Under the young, telegenic leader Selahattin Demirtas, the HDP is ready to roll the dice. Both personally and politically it’s a high-stakes game for the 42-year-old Kurdish lawyer and human rights advocate.
On Friday, two explosions tore through his final campaign rally, killing two people and injuring 100 others in Diyarbakir, the main city of the predominantly Kurdish southeast. Whether accident or assassination attempt was not immediately clear, but Demirtas called for calm. Earlier this week gunmen fired on an HDP campaign vehicle, killing its driver, according to The Associated Press. And last month two local HDP offices were bombed, injuring six people.
Meanwhile the party is gaining momentum. Demirtas’s gamble could win it up to 60 seats in parliament and stamp its brand on mainstream politics — or leave the Kurds side- lined and excluded. Erdogan, too, is in play: a resounding win of more than 330 seats in the 550-seat parliament would allow him to rewrite the constitution to bolster presidential power, furthering an increasingly conservative and religious agenda.
With a famously well-oiled political machine, and religious and working class voters behind him, that’s not unlikely. But if he loses, his days in the leadership could be limited.
The HDP is billing itself as the real opposition, kicking aside some longtime Turkish political taboos — human rights, gender equality, workers’ rights and the environment — to reach out to youth, women and an educated middle class who are frustrated by what they see as Erdogan’s growing authoritarianism.
The brutally suppressed Taksim Square protests of 2013 have sparked simmering hostility. So has brushing aside a major corruption scandal, jailing journalists and prosecuting dissident writers.
Erdogan’s constitutional ambitions have alarmed disenchanted former voters as well as dissidents, who see the HDP as a road block to the majority he would need to push through changes. The intrusion of religion into Turkey’s relatively relaxed urban lifestyle reinforces the fear of creeping authoritarianism. Heavy-handed measures such as the restriction of alcohol sales, and warnings against kissing in subways, have raised the suspicions of secular-leaning Turks who identify as Muslim but do not want a return to an Ottoman-style religious state.
The HDP came within tantalizing reach of the 10-per-cent barrier in the 2014 presidential election. But will disgruntled voters seize on it as an alternative? “Allegiances are shifting and people are thinking strategically,” Barkey says.
But if the Kurdish party fails to win the crucial 10 per cent of the vote its seats would go to Erdogan’s party, the second-runner in HDP constituencies, delivering the numbers he needs to consolidate executive power, and leaving Kurds virtually voiceless in parliament.
Either way, Barkey believes, a political crisis could be looming. And either way, this election will be a game changer for Turkey and the Kurds — who will make history, or repeat it.