Turkey’s opposition leader is likely to receive crucial Kurdish support in his bid to unseat Erdogan in the May 14 polls, but a victory for the opposition remains far from assured. By Mahmut Bozarslan in Al-Monitor on April 9, 2023.
Turkey’s Kurds are expected to support presidential contender Kemal Kilicdaroglu in the May 14 polls, a critical factor in the strongest opposition effort yet to end President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s two-decade rule, pollsters say.
Kilicdaroglu, leader of the main opposition People’s Republican Party (CHP) and the joint candidate of the six-party National Alliance, is in a neck-and-neck race with Erdogan, according to opinion polls, with some surveys putting him in the lead.
In tacit support for Kilicdaroglu, the People’s Democratic Party (HDP), Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish movement, announced last month it would not field a candidate in the presidential polls as its “historical responsibility against [Erdogan’s] one-man rule.” The announcement was preceded by talks between Kilicdaroglu and HDP leaders, in which both sides called for “a new beginning” to return Turkey to the path of democracy and pledged to discuss and resolve the Kurdish issue in parliament.
In Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast, support for Kilicdaroglu’s presidential bid is likely to be stronger than that for the HDP in the simultaneous parliamentary polls, Roj Girasun, the coordinator of Rawest, a polling company based in Diyarbakir, the largest city of the region, told Al-Monitor.
The HDP won more than 50% of the vote in most southeastern provinces in the 2018 parliamentary elections, including in the most populous one of Diyarbakir, where it topped 65%. Votes for the party nationwide stood at 11.7% and that figure is expected to change little in the upcoming polls.
On the streets of Diyarbakir, the HDP’s strategy for the presidential race seems to resonate.
Asiye Hatun Aydinoglu, a retired public servant and HDP voter, told Al-Monitor, “I will happily vote for Kilicdaroglu. He is a leader that I like — honest and respectful.”
Though some regretted the absence of a HDP candidate in the presidential polls, most HDP voters interviewed by Al-Monitor said they would heed the decision of their party and the appeals of Selahattin Demirtas, the imprisoned former party leader. Demirtas landed behind bars in 2016 as Ankara cracked down on the Kurdish political movement, but remains immensely popular and often communicates messages from jail, urging opposition voters to unite to defeat Erdogan.
Kilicdaroglu is credited with moderating the CHP’s approach to the Kurds since becoming the party’s chairman in 2010. “The transformation that Kilicdaroglu led was followed with interest by Kurdish voters, but their interest did not translate to [electoral] support. Things began to change in the 2019 local polls with the HDP’s steering. Now, with Kilicdaroglu’s presidential candidacy, it will turn into substantial support,” Girasun said.
The pollster was referring to mayoral races in western Turkey in 2019, when tacit collaboration between the main opposition and the HDP was first tested. The HDP sat out the races in several big cities with sizeable Kurdish migrant populations, most notably Istanbul, paving the way for its voters to back CHP candidates and help them win mayoral posts long held by Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP).
Kilicdaroglu’s outreach to the HDP has been rather low key to avoid upsetting the delicate balances in his diverse alliance. Nationalist voters in the opposition bloc are averse to aligning with the HDP, which risks being outlawed by the Constitutional Court for alleged links to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), the outlawed outfit designated as a terrorist group for taking up arms against Ankara in 1984.
The HDP itself will contest the elections under the banner of the Green Left Party against the risk of an 11th-hour decision by the Constitutional Court to ban the HDP ahead of the polls.
As for the AKP, its support among the Kurds has been on the decline since peace talks to resolve the Kurdish issue collapsed in 2015 and Erdogan allied with the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) in his pursuit of what is widely seen today as a one-man regime.
The AKP has been the Kurdish movement’s sole notable rival in the southeast ever since it came to power in 2002, drawing pious Kurds with a message of Muslim fraternity and others with reforms expanding Kurdish freedoms in its early years in power.
A combination of factors has caused its popularity to sag in recent years, according to Vahap Coskun, a prominent academic and political analyst in Diyarbakir. “An important segment of Kurdish voters has gravitated away from the AKP because of the party’s failure to offer hope economically, its poor economic performance in recent times, its alliance with the MHP and abandonment of its claim to resolve the Kurdish issue through democratic means,” Coskun told Al-Monitor.
According to Girasun, the AKP has lost about a third of the Kurdish voters who backed it in the 2018 parliamentary polls.
The disenchanted Kurds are now likely to back the CHP and two smaller opposition parties led by former Erdogan associates, Coskun said.
In Diyarbakir, for instance, at least one CHP candidate is expected to be elected to parliament, a feat the party has failed to achieve in the past two decades.
Meanwhile, Coskun noted, most first-time Kurdish voters, who represent nearly 25% of the 6 million young people eligible to vote for the first time across the country, prefer the HDP.
The CHP’s revival in the southeast is also reflected in a growing list of Kurdish tribal leaders and local notables joining the party. Tribes were once a powerful force in the regional politics, often voting in blocs of thousands for a given party. Though urbanization and the growth of the middle class have eroded such voting patterns, the CHP’s ability to attract tribal leaders and other local notables is seen as a sign of changing power perceptions in the region.
“The tribes could be generally better at sensing government changes and turn faster to parties that stand a chance of coming to power,” Girasun said. “It’s not that those parties grow stronger because of the shifts of tribes, but the tribes shift to them because they have grown stronger.”
Despite the anticipation of crucial Kurdish support for Kilicdaroglu, victory for the CHP leader cannot be taken for granted, pollsters warn. Two smaller opposition parties have fielded their own candidates in the presidential race, making it harder for Kilicdaroglu to win in the first round.
Erdogan, too, seems to believe that tiny margins could sway the outcome. Last month, he struck an alliance with Huda-Par, a small Islamist Kurdish party, braving criticism and controversy over the party’s roots in Hezbollah, a violent group unrelated to its Lebanese namesake that fought the PKK in the 1990s and is held responsible for dozens of other killings, including of police and Islamists opposed to its radical means.
By Mahmut Bozarslan in Al-Monitor on April 9, 2023.