Kurdish party aims for electoral strike at Erdogan
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan
In June a fledgling alliance of the underdogs of Turkish politics — Kurds, leftists and women’s rights activists — stunned Turkey’s political elite by winning 13 per cent of a parliamentary poll.
On Sunday, they hope to do it again, but this time against a more disturbing backdrop: the resumption of hostilities between the state and Kurdish militants;
Islamist bomb attacks against Kurdish activists; and polarising political rhetoric from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan
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If the People’s Democratic party (HDP) reaches the 10 per cent threshold for representation in parliament, it will deliver an enduring rebuke to the leadership to Mr Erdogan, probably robbing him of both an outright majority for his party and certainly of the aura of invincibility that has cloaked him since he started the first of three terms as prime minister in 2003.
“At least they have new ideas,” said Yildiz Aslan, a 24-year-old in Istanbul’s Uskudar neighbourhood, who said that, although not a Kurd, she intended to vote for the HDP.
“The AKP has been in power since I was a child, and my family always votes for them,” she said. “But for me, you must always remind the politicians that you are independent, not always on their side.”
The November elections are a re-run of the June ballot, which yielded the
historic inclusion of the pro-Kurdish HDP in the legislature, but also a split parliament, failed coalition talks and a fresh election.
Since then, Islamic militants bombed the HDP section of a peace rally in Ankara in Turkey’s biggest terrorist attack, killing 102 people. The party’s local headquarters have been attacked, and its leader, Selahattin Demirtas, is being investigated for insulting the president, and for producing propaganda for a terror organisation. Mr Demirtas declined to be interviewed, citing his busy campaign schedule.
The attack in Ankara forced the HDP to suspend its mass rallies because of security concerns,
ending the raucous affairs that brought together Kurds seeking a political voice, leftists who have long been banished to the fringes of the political discourse, women and gay rights activists, and even ex-Erdogan supporters who see his attempts at an executive presidency as an over-reach of power.
The ruling Justice and Development party, or AKP, and the largest opposition groups, have meanwhile sharpened their attacks against the HDP, which they once dismissed as political minnows. At stake is the loyalty of an estimated 15m Kurds, who until recently split their votes between Erdogan’s party and the opposition.
Mr Erdogan is not giving up on Kurdish votes easily. He has made public appearances in the restive Kurdish-majority south with a Kurdish Koran, a reminder of the fact that over the past few years he has introduced greater freedoms for the Kurdish language, which was mostly banned until 1991. He reminds citizens that he initiated peace talks with the Kurdistan Workers’ party, or PKK, which is designated a terrorist organisation by the EU and the US. Those talks are stalled, a fact he blames on the PKK.
Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has also repeatedly tried to tie the HDP with the PKK, an allegation aimed at holding on to Kurdish voters who fear a return to the violence of the 1990s. It is an easy accusation to make — the HDP was forged after a 2013 message from the imprisoned leader of the PKK, Abdullah Ocalan, urged his supporters to consider a political solution for Kurdish rights. Mr Demirtas’s brother fights for the outlawed PKK and at some HDP rallies in the south, supporters have shown up with Ocalan flags.
“The actual barrier for the HDP is not the nationwide 10 per cent vote — the barrier is if they have put enough distance between the terrorist organisation (PKK) and their political organisation,” Numan Kurtulmus, deputy prime minister, said.
Mr Kurtulmus said he did not believe that the HDP had succeeded on that front. “If they can put some distance from the terrorist activities, they will be very positive participants of the Turkish democratic system.”
It has taken all of Mr Demirtas’s skill at oratory to deflect those allegations and separate perceptions of the HDP from the violent PKK. The government’s response to the Ankara bombing, where it blamed an unlikely alliance of the PKK, Isis militants and other rivals in Syria of co-ordinating an attack on Kurds in Turkey, helped too.
“Until the HDP won in the last elections, and crossed this 10 per cent threshold, the government was much more accommodating, said Ilter Turan, a professor of political science at Bilgi University. “Only after it became apparent that the HDP could deny the government their majority, the president initiated a line that accuses them of being an arm of the PKK. It’s not an legal thing — it’s a political thing. The goal is essentially to say that if they vote for the HDP, they are voting for a terrorist organisation.”
Mr Erdogan is not on the ballot, but is aiming for an outright majority for his party so he can endow his constitutionally ceremonial presidency with executive powers. He has already served three terms as prime minister, the maximum his party’s rules would allow. That ambition, and his previous crackdown on free speech and religious freedoms, has drawn to the HDP a disparate group of supporters and parliamentarians.
“Voters see the HDP as the actor that can stop Erdogan, especially what he calls his Turkish-style presidency,” said Hisyar Ozsoy, a Kurdish academic at the University of Michigan, who returned to the town of Bingol to win a seat in parliament in the June elections. “This brings together this very diverse group of people, people who vote strategically to stop Erdogan.”
It is a refrain repeated by other HDP candidates too. It is an attempt to remind voters that a vote for the HDP is as much a vote against Mr Erdogan as it is a vote for Kurdish rights.
Ertugrul Kurkcu, is an old-school Marxist who gave up his leadership of the HDP to Mr Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag, a socialist and women’s rights activist. Mr Kurkcu, who is not Kurdish, spent 14 years in prison after a military court in the 1970s convicted him of planning violence against the state.
After years on the political fringe, he won a seat to parliament from the coastal town of Izmir on an HDP ticket and is standing again.
“A Kurdish political leader fits the task rather more than an old-guard leftist like me,” the 67-year-old candidate said. “Even if we are the best friends of the Kurds, they still want to hear the voice of one of their sons, one of their brethren. Without the Kurds, there would be no HDP, but without the left, there could be some sort of strong Kurdish party.”
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