ISTANBUL, Turkey – Turkey’s June 7 elections are turning into a showdown between the pro-Kurdish HDP party and the ruling AKP party’s biggest champion, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The outcome of the polls – seen as Turkey’s most crucial -- will decide not only the fate of NATO member Turkey, but the region as a whole.
The elections are crucial because the Justice and Development Party (AKP) stands firmly behind Erdogan’s ambitions to change the constitution and take Turkey from a parliamentary system to a presidential one. He also wants nearly total power invested in the presidency.
The Peoples´ Democratic Party (HDP), on the other hand, is fighting to win at least 10 percent of the votes in order to qualify for a seat in parliament as a party.
If it wins, it will be the first time that a Kurdish party sits in the Turkish parliament. In addition, HDP co-leader Selahattin Demirtas has vowed to derail the president’s plans to change the constitution and to bar him from consolidating greater power.
¨Mr Recep Tayyip Erdogan, you will never be able to be the head of the nation as long as the HDP exists and as long as the HDP people are on this soil,” Demirtas said at a party meeting last month.
For the first time in Turkish history, a pro-Kurdish party holds the key to what is seen as Turkey´s most critical elections ever.
Ironically – and reluctantly -- the HDP has turned into the hope both of anti-AKP republicans and leftists. But that does not necessarily mean they will vote for the Kurdish party.
That is because they are highly suspicious that HDP would strike a deal with Erdogan in return for sealing a peace deal with the Kurdistan Workers´ Party (PKK), whose jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan still calls the shots over Kurdish politics in Turkey. Ankara refers to the PKK as a “terrorist” organization.
It is with this backdrop that a sharp confrontation has begun and is escalating by the day, as HDP rises in polls.
After simultaneous bomb blasts hit the offices of the HDP in two cities in southern Turkey on Monday, Demirtas openly blamed Erdogan.
Addressing “those who tried to send us a message through their attacks in Mersin and Adana,” Demirtas said: “We have received your message. And we will still not allow you to be president.”
Addressing voters in a speech in Samsun on the same day, Erdogan retorted: "Will you give the appropriate answer to the political party which is run by the terrorist organization on June 7?"
In order to get their way, Erdogan and the AKP need to walk a tightrope: not only to they need the support of voters among Turkey´s 15 million Kurdish population, they have to appeal to nationalists who are violently against the HDP and the peace process with the PKK.
If the HDP meets the 10 percent threshold and gets into parliament, that could mean the end of Erdogan’s dreams of a “super¨ presidency.
In the 550-seat parliament AKP -- which currently occupies 312 seats -- needs a majority in order to change the constitution. Analysts say that is not realistic. Yet, if it manages to win a more modest 330 seats, it will have the quorum needed for amendments to the constitution, or to hold a referendum for a new one.
Those hopes will be dashed if the HDP manages to go beyond the threshold, because that would mean the loss of at least 20 seats from the AKP.
Demirtas believes that a victory would not only contain Erdogan, it would also lead to the continuation of the HDP-facilitated peace talks between the government and the PKK and a “civilian and democratic” new constitution.
For the HDP, these elections are historic; they are also a gamble: if the Kurdish party fails to win it will not be able to enter parliament, since it decided to enter the elections as a party rather than running independents as a tactic to get around the threshold as Kurdish-affiliated parties have been doing for more than two decades.
An HDP failure at the polls would leave the path open for the AKP to sweep all the HDP-aligned votes in the Kurdish region.
“Turkish politics could boil over if HDP’s gamble doesn’t pay off,” argues prominent Turkish academic Kemal Kirisci, director of the Turkey Project at the Brookings Institution.
“There are increasing speculations that HDP’s exclusion from parliament would radicalize politics, lead to civil strife and accelerate Turkey’s descent into chaos,” he warns. “It is quite plausible that Ocalan would lose popularity and thereby his ability to control the radical elements within the Kurdish nationalist movement and the PKK.”
According to Murat Yetkin, news editor at the Hurriyet Daily, “The lack of representation of the HDP in parliament would cause a big political vacuum. It is a big unknown whether it might lead to a resumption of armed struggle by the PKK or an early election to balance the situation.”
Demirtas has said that if his party fails at the polls he would resign and the HDP would start a “a non-violent” campaign for an early election with a reduced threshold.
Thus, the big question on which everything turns is this: will HDP get the number of votes it needs.
According to the latest polls the HDP is expected to win around 10 percent of the vote, the AKP around 42-44 percent, the main opposition CHP around 25-27 percent and the MHP around 15-17 percent.
“Knife-edge is the perfect expression to explain the situation of the HDP,” says columnist Ahmet Hakan. “The HDP is in a situation where every single vote has huge value,” he writes. He says the reason Erdogan has been attending one rally after another is to take away every vote he can from the HDP.
In speeches in the country´s conservative Kurdish southeast, Erdogan has held up a Quran, in Kurdish translation.
“That is part of his strategy to woo the deeply conservative Kurdish constituency away from the pro-Kurdish but secular and leftist HDP,” according to Halil Karaveli, editor of the Turkey Analyst. But he argues that “playing the Islamic card is no longer going to pay off as handsomely as has been the case for several decades.”
According to academic and columnist Nuray Mert, “Religion has become the main political weapon, which has taken the form of blackmailing the opposition by labelling them “un-Islamic” and as an “enemy of Islam.”
A pro-AKP newspaper recently “exposed” that Demirtas had eaten a ham sandwich on his recent European tour,” breaking the Islamic ban on eating pork.
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