What went wrong with Turkey’s Kurds?

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Weeks after the latest elections, a sense of disappointment overwhelms many Kurdish politicians and the public in Turkey due to the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party’s (HDP) poor performance and the opposition’s failure to unseat President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Eight years ago, for the first time, a pro-Kurdish party passed the 10 percent threshold and entered the Turkish parliament when the HDP gained 13,12 percent of the votes in the June 2015 parliamentary election. Prior to this victory, Kurds only entered the legislature as independent lawmakers. When the results were canceled due to Erdogan’s failure to form a new cabinet, the HDP votes decreased to 10.7 percent in the second round. Three years later, the party performed well again, winning nearly 12 percent of the vote. This gave Kurds hope for a bright future in a country where they had been systematically oppressed for decades.

Both wins were largely due to strong campaigns fueled by inspiring words from the HDP’s charismatic and young leader Selahattin Demirtas.

The Kurds were hoping to finally have real representation in the Turkish parliament after the two wins, but they could not bring about any major changes to the status of Kurds because the government targeted the HDP lawmakers, charging them with alleged terror links. The parliamentary immunity or membership of many of them were revoked. 

The hope of real representation in the legislature was destroyed when the HDP’s votes fell to 8.8 percent in the latest poll on May 14, though it can still enter the legislature thanks to the recent reduction of the threshold to seven percent. 

The pro-Kurdish party has come under fire from supporters for mishandling the election campaign. Many Kurds on social media demanded the party make drastic changes. "Party reform is needed!" tweeted Firat Arslan on May 15, accusing the HDP of failing to be a party for all.    

The HDP has acknowledged its failures and promised to learn from its mistakes ahead of March 2024 local elections. It will hold a congress where co-chairs Pervin Buldan and Mithat Sancar will not run to retain their posts. 

But the biggest blow to the party came when Demirtas announced his temporary retirement from active politics after failing to help his party from jail. 

The party went into the election on the backfoot. In 2021, Turkey’s chief prosecutor filed a lawsuit in the Constitutional Court seeking the dissolution of the HDP for alleged links to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). To avoid a potential political ban, the party in March decided to field candidates through an alternative, recently-established party - Green Left Party. The HDP also formed an alliance with several Turkish leftist parties. 

All this preparation was aimed at guaranteeing a better performance and to make sure that their alliance with the leftists and an informal deal with the main opposition bloc would end Erdogan’s two-decade reign. Why? Because the party has suffered enormously under his successive governments, which have cracked down on the party’s officials, members, and supporters, jailing thousands of them for alleged ties with the PKK. The party’s former co-chairs Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag are among the detainees whom the HDP calls political “hostages.” 

Lackluster comeback

The HDP launched its electoral campaign with the motto “We again,” hoping to enter the race with the same strong spirit of previous polls. However, the party did not do enough on the ground to ensure its message was delivered across the country, with many of its supporters complaining that the lack of a charismatic leader resulted in tedious campaigns that were tailored in a way that would not anger their Turkish leftist allies.

The party lost more than one million votes compared to the 2018 elections, according to data from the country’s electoral body. 

Roj Girasun, director of the Rawest Research polling company, told Rudaw English that four factors were behind the party’s loss. 

In the past, a large number of people from opposition parties voted for the HDP to help it pass the threshold, but they did not do so this time because they knew the party no longer needed their support to reach the lowered threshold, he said. 

Leadership was another factor. “HDP does not have a charismatic leader like Demirtas. Current HDP politicians and officials are not charismatic, so they cannot gain the support of the public. This contributed to the weakness of the HDP,” said the Kurdish researcher.

The party’s failure to field “renowned or social” candidates for the parliamentary and its decision not to put any candidate into the presidential race also contributed to the loss, added Girasun. 

When the HDP announced two Turkish journalists, Hasan Cemal and Cengiz Candar, as parliamentary candidates it drew the ire of many Kurds who said the party should not give space to them while there are many patriotic Kurds who the party should be supporting. Only Candar made it to the legislature, representing the Kurdish province of Diyarbakir (Amed).

In an interview with pro-opposition Arti Gercek news agency, Demirtas said that the lists of HDP candidates did not meet the expectations of the party’s supporters. 

“There are criticisms that there is a lack of a certain method in the creation of the lists and that the expectations and suggestions of the public are not taken into account,” said the former HDP leader, adding that these criticisms should be taken “seriously” by the party. 

He held the party leaders responsible for “ignoring the people’s democracy,” calling it “an ideological deviation.” 

Demirtas also revealed for the first time that he had asked his party to field him as a presidential candidate in order to boost the HDP’s performance, but his request was ignored. His presidential candidacy in 2018 was vital to the party’s remarkable performance. 

His wife, Basak Demirtas, represented him in the HDP electoral campaigns and was warmly welcomed by supporters. She also delivered strong messages that voters could get behind. 

In a bid to defeat Erdogan's candidates in the 2019 local elections, the HDP indirectly supported the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) by not fielding their own candidates in some areas outside of the Kurdish-majority southeast. This strategy worked well and CHP beat Erdogan’s candidates in Istanbul and Ankara - something which would not be possible without the votes of millions of Kurds. 

However, in the latest presidential election, the HDP explicitly supported CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu and ended up losing a seat to a CHP candidate in Amed where the main opposition party has not won a seat in more than two decades.

Buldan acknowledged on Sunday that their lists were lacking and did not represent the breadth of their supporters. 

“We did not go outside of circles, we couldn’t grow. We lacked inclusion of different components among us, for example, the lack of Armenians, Yazidi or disabled representations were one of the important shortcomings,” she said. 

Soner Cagaptay, a Senior Fellow at Washington Institute, told Rudaw English that the lower turnout in the HDP strongholds also contributed to the party’s loss. 

“I see a few reasons why they did not [do well]. One is [that] they did not like that their party supported the Kemalists’ candidate. Never mind the platform of this Kemalist candidate. Kilicdaroglu was saying he was going to resettle or reset Turkey’s injustices, apologize for these injustices,” he noted. 

He added that many Kurdish conservative voters may not have liked Kilicdaroglu’s Alevi background.

Alevism, a modernist current of Islam, has a bad reputation among the predominantly Sunni population of Turkey, including in Kurdish areas. Many conservative Muslims would never support an Alevi to be their leader.

Consequences  

The impact of the election results will not fade away soon and could play a key role in next year’s local elections. The HDP has performed well in such elections in the past but this will not happen again this time around if the party makes the same mistakes it did last month.

In the past, Erdogan’s governments intensified their crackdowns on the HDP whenever the party won at the ballot box. The two parties are main rivals in Kurdish areas. The revenge was obvious in 2019 when the HDP mayors were accused of having links with the PKK and many of them were detained, removed from their positions for terror-related charges, and replaced with pro-government appointees. This was seen as a reprisal for HDP’s support for the CHP in Istanbul and Ankara. Until 2019, Erdogan and his party had won all elections in Istanbul since the nineties. 
The Kurdish analyst Girasun said there will not be any positive changes regarding the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) government’s treatment of the HDP. 

“I do not expect the government of AKP or Erdogan to change positively towards the Kurds because of the HDP’s alliance with the opposition and Erdogan gained fewer votes from Kurds (compared to previous elections),” he said.

Neither Kilicdaroglu nor his alliance of six parties thanked the HDP for its support, nor did they acknowledge it. He had a meeting with HDP co-chairs and made a deal with them before the elections but the details have not been publicized. 

Erdogan has said several times that he would not allow the release of Demirtas from jail. In his first speech after winning the elections on May 28, he renewed this vow and his supporters could be heard calling for Demirtas’ execution. Demirtas campaigned for Kilicdaroglu more than his party and Erdogan’s fresh threat may signal a new clampdown on the HDP. The opposition candidate had promised to end the oppression of Kurds in the country and free Demirtas. 

The pro-Kurdish party is not the only loser of the elections. The AKP too lost several seats but it was still able to form the biggest parliamentary alliance - thanks to its nationalist allies. 

In addition, the Rights and Freedoms Party (HAK-PAR), which considers itself a Kurdish party, lost more than 50 percent of the votes it previously received. It then claimed that its votes were “stolen.” 

May’s elections were Turkey’s most hotly contested in decades and many parties are already making preparations for next year’s local polls. The HDP wants to elect a new leadership that can rectify its mistakes and help the party regain its widespread support in Kurdish areas.