Turkey goes to the polls in its most crucial general elections

ISTANBUL, Turkey — Turkey votes in its most critical general elections Sunday, where for the first time the main opposition comes from a pro-Kurdish party.

Although the polls are for the 550-seat parliament, they are widely seen as a referendum on President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s vision of reviving Turkey’s Ottoman past, and raising himself as the most powerful president since Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Turkish Republic.

The 61-year-old Erdogan, who has been at the forefront of politics since 2003, needs a pliant enough parliament to push through changes in the constitution that would transform the Turkish government into a presidency, and place unprecedented powers into his own hands.

The AKP – Erdogan’s old party when he was prime minister, and from which he resigned to become president last year – stands firmly behind its old captain's charted trajectory.

But the HDP, the first pro-Kurdish party fighting for a seat in the Turkish parliament, has vowed not to let Erdogan get the powers he wants. To win a seat and stand in Erdogan’s way, it must win at least 10 percent of the votes.

“Each vote the People’s Democratic Party (HDP) will get to pass the 10 percent election threshold and above is going to make a single party government less possible,” said Tanju Tosun, a prominent political scientist and university professor in the city of Izmir.

The elections take place in an atmosphere of tension, following several attacks on the HDP, some of them deadly.

In the latest incident on Friday, two people were reported killed in twin, coordinated bomb attacks in the city of Diyarbakir during an HDP election rally. On Wednesday, unknown assailants fired on the HDP’s campaign vehicle, killing the driver.

These latest attacks – for which no one has so far been blamed -- came weeks after bomb explosions at HDP offices injured six people in southern Adana city and neighboring Mersin.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Saturday that the two explosions in Diyarbakir were acts of "sabotage and provocation."

To win, the HDP needs more than just the Kurdish vote from the 15-million strong community that has been fighting for decades for greater rights. It must also appeal to non-Kurdish supporters, in order to remain true to its claim of being a non-ethnic, truly Turkish party.

The hunting ground for votes is among the many voters who are turned off by the AKP’s conservative Muslim agenda.

The AKP’s vision of three-children families and mothers staying at home does not appeal to all Turks. Nor does its rhetoric: last year, Davutoglu’s deputy told women not to laugh in public. More recently Erdogan, who has been accused by the opposition of illegally campaigning for his old party, insisted that men and women were “not made equal.”

Traditionally, the AKP’s main opposition has come from the nationalist Republican Peoples’ Party (CHP), which in 2011 picked up more than a quarter of the votes.

“I think in this election the HDP is the opponent of the AKP, not the CHP,” said Tosun, who has long experience of studying CHP, Turkey’s oldest political party.

“The HDP is giving voters the message that it will be the one to solve the Kurdish problem, and in a larger context the democratization problem,” Tosun added. He said that if AKP gets less than 276 seats it might go to an early election, “after forming a minority government for a short period.”

Adnan Caglar, a retired journalist in the city of Izmir which has a large Kurdish population, said he is voting for HDP because he wants the Kurdish problem solved peacefully.

“I believe the Kurdish question must be solved within the parliament and all the democrats should support the HDP -- and they will,” he told Rudaw.

One of the top priorities for any government in Turkey is to officially end a three-decade conflict with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) that has cost 40,000 lives.

A peace process between Ankara and the PKK’s jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan – announced in March 2013 — has largely stuttered, with accusations by Kurdish politicians that the AKP government and Erdogan have been dragging their feet.

“We are closer than ever to achieving peace in Turkey,” said Sirri Sureyya Onder, the Kurdish politician who read out another statement by Ocalan last February, after meeting with government officials in Istanbul’s Dolmabahce palace.

“The solution of the Kurdish problem means the democratization of Turkey, yet the AKP and its superior mind, Erdogan, moved away from democracy,” said Huseyin Aykol, co-editor of the pro-PKK Ozgur Gundem.

He told Rudaw that an HDP victory at the polls is essential, not only to resolve the Kurdish issue, but also to place a check on Erdogan’s runaway ambitions.

“It would empower the HDP as an interlocutor. But more importantly, it will control Erdogan’s mindset, which is like a truck going downhill without a brake,” he said.

Turkey goes to the polls in its most crucial general elections

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