HDP's massive election rally in Istanbul, May 30, 2015. Demotix/ Sahan Nuholglu. All rights reserved.Demotix/ Sahan Nuholglu. All rights reserved.
Two historic general elections were held in Turkey over the course of four months in 2015. The desperate losers in the first elections on 7 June turned out to be the (in)glorious winners 120 days later, serving to confirm the idea that elections can serve different goals depending on their particular political contexts. Moreover, by the second elections on 1 November, what had been a relatively stable and peaceful country in June 2015 was now in the throes of a violent ‘war on terror’ against the Kurdish militants. This left a tenuous 2013 ceasefire in tatters and changed the face of Kurdish towns into virtual war zones.
Within this broad arc of events lies the crucial story of the rise and (perhaps) fall of the pro-Kurdish People's Democracy Party (HDP). For the first time in the history of Turkey, on 7 June a pro-Kurdish party attracted enough 'Turkish' support to surpass the 10% election threshold and gain access to parliament. This triggered a chain of reactions that precipitated a re-election, resurgent ultranationalism, escalated fighting in the east, and severe crackdowns on the press and other forms of personal freedom. Political positions have solidified alongside these events and spaces for political expression have narrowed if not closed completely. HDP, faced with waning support, is struggling to negotiate this shrinking field, maintain its legitimacy amongst its constituents, and make productive use of however much time left it has in the Turkish parliament.
How could have this happened? What effect did this reemergence of violence – a trademark of the “military solution” of the Kurdish issue since the 1990s – have on the triumphant rise and then fading of the pro-Kurdish People’s Democracy Party (HDP)? Moreover, what does this mean for the political space of parliament in Turkey, and how has their entrance into the Turkish Grand National Assembly altered Turkish politics?
Impact of
the non-identical-twin elections
Rosettes at HDP's massive election rally in Istanbul. Demotix/ Sahan Nuhoglu. All rights reserved.The significance
of the 7 June elections was twofold. First, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
founder of the AKP, prime minister between 2002-2014, and since 2014, the
president of the republic, turned it into a plebiscite for his grand project of
an executive presidency. In his election
campaign, Erdogan had explicitly asked the electorate to vote for two
interdependent goals: keep the votes of the Kurdish HDP under the 10% threshold required to win any seats in parliament, and give the AKP the number
of seats necessary to amend the constitution to make executive presidency come
true. The results were shattering for
the so-far invincible Erdogan who had carried his party (the AKP) through three
spectacular election victories since 2002 with no serious competition. The AKP won the most seats (258) but lost 10% of the votes it
received in the 2011 elections and fell short of the majority needed (276) even
to form a government.
Second, for the first time in Turkish political life, a Kurdish
political party, the HDP, passed the 10% threshold and won 80 seats. This put it on a par with its nemesis, the far-right Nationalist Action Party (MHP),
which is a
single-issue party adamantly against any peace process with the Kurdish
nationalists.
Acting on the conviction that the party lost its parliamentary majority due to the
defection of some of its conservative-nationalist voters to the hardline
nationalist MHP, Erdogan set out a series of orchestrations to reverse the
election results to recoup its “conservative pious Kurdish” votes from the HDP
and shrink the MHP which shared more or less the same Turkish nationalist voter
base. The army resumed extensive
military operations against PKK militants in late July, ostensibly because the
cease-fire with the PKK, which the government initiated in March 2013 to allow
peace talks with the PKK’s incarcerated leader Abdullah Ocalan, became
impossible to sustain.
The government’s decision to launch a massive offensive
against the PKK was clearly an attempt to link the PKK militants, who are
branded as terrorists by the US and many European countries, with the HDP, and to
push the HDP back below the 10% threshold needed for parliamentary
representation.
In addition, the government was alarmed by the fact that the
Kurdish conflict was also growing on the back of the Syrian crisis in such a
way as to embolden the PKK strategically as well as psychologically. The PKK’s Syrian Kurdish brethren, the
Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), is a key partner of the anti-ISIS alliance and had begun to carve out a semi-autonomous Kurdish zone in Northern
Syria.
The 1 November elections were held as massive warfare in the
southeast threatened to spiral out of control and two massive suicide attacks
were mounted by ISIS, one in Suruc, a Kurdish town on the Syrian border,
killing 33 Kurdish activists, and the other at a pro-Kurdish rally in Ankara 20
days before the elections, taking 102 lives.
The
fear factor
Blast victims' funeral in Ankara, October 11. Demotix/Recep Yilmaz.All rights reserved.The president’s electoral strategy for the AKP was built on
offering twin slogans to the public: either a majority AKP government or PKK
and ISIS terrorism. Fears about public safety caused by the escalation of
violence over the summer and many AKP supporters’ existential fear of being
recriminated against if the party failed to form a government seem to have
served Erdogan’s objectives.
The AKP’s support climbed from 40.9% to 49.5%,
while voters turned away from both the nationalist MHP and the pro-Kurdish HDP,
the latter barely passing the 10% threshold, dipping from 12.7% of the vote to 10.7% (from 80 deputies to 59). It can be argued that situational restrictions, which
included the security concerns of
politicians campaigning in the region and the clampdown on newspapers and
television stations and freedom of expression in general, also played a huge
part in bringing about the election disaster of the HDP.
More to the point, however, Erdogan’s objective to brand the
HDP as controlled by ruthless militants worked. In explaining the question of
the HDP’s loss of one million votes in November, especially in the provinces
where it had made the strongest gains in June, a related view is that “the HDP
was made to pay for the problems” caused by the PKK’s youth wing in
predominantly Kurdish cities, where they disrupted business by digging ditches
and erecting barricades to prevent security forces from entering their
neighborhoods.
YDG-H armed members in Cizre, Şırnak, Turkey, October 2015. Wikicommons/Mahmut Bozarslan. Voice of America. Some rigths reserved.
Challenges to the HDP’s democratic prospects
To shed some light on the possibilities and perils that lie
ahead for the HDP, it is important to recognise that the HDP presented a
daunting challenge to the AKP as a serious political contender.
The June 2015 elections acted as a catalyst for changing the
trajectory of Kurdish identity politics and Turkish responses to it. It is
clear that the HDP reinvented itself before the June elections as a new and
energising force adopting a much-needed platform for expressing the progressive
and democratic demands of 'Turkish' as well as Kurdish political elements,
which included social democrats, liberals, leftists, women, the young, LGBT communities, and free-thinking intellectuals. The HDP’s
transformation as a new archetype of political party around which broader
ethnic, gender, ideological and generational loyalties came to be articulated
alarmed the ruling party.
Challenge 1:
its own success in transforming itself
The new HDP
represented a fundamental shift from the
narrow and rather unpopular appeals of Kurdish identity-centred parties of the
past at the very moment when the ruling party itself appeared to be evolving
into its own model of executive presidency, whereby the president considered
himself the embodiment of 'national democracy' and custodian of its unity.
Although the social democratic Republican People’s Party
(CHP) has been the main opposition party in the parliament for the last 13
years, its stale structure and ideology proved ineffective in blocking the
AKP’s increasing tendency to concentrate power in the executive, circumscribe
its democratic institutions and clamp down on freedoms, oppositional politics, the
media and academic life. It was clear that on the eve of the 7 June elections,
it was the HDP not the CHP that had become the main challenge to Erdogan’s realisation
of his dream of a presidency with boosted executive powers.
The HDP’s rise to replace the CHP and its public perception
as energising the leftist political
imagination and acting as agents of hope and change played a huge role in
driving Erdogan to trigger the post-election
crisis in the hope of calling early elections, so that the HDP would be buried
under the 10% threshold needed for parliamentary representation.
It should be added that although it was not yet clear
whether the party could forge a new identity without abandoning the specific
needs and preferences of the Kurdish population, the campaign of Selahattin
Demirtas, the HDP’s co-leader,
helped to fashion a party with an unprecedented new face, and a much-needed
inspiring leader for Turkey. From a provincial Kurdish background, Demirtas turned into a star performer by
exhibiting qualities which were at once humble, humane, humorous, thoughtful,
articulate and honest.
Challenge 2:
the AKP’s convergence with the secular-republican tradition
Discussing the role and significance of the HDP in Turkish
democracy requires coming to terms with the ruling party’s propensity to
support the secular-republican system’s nationalist, statist and
security-driven priorities and its 'military
solution' perspective.
The faultlines
that produced Kurdish demands for more rights, greater autonomy and economic,
social, and cultural development are rooted in the republican logic of a unitary
state that emerged long before the AKP.
It is also true that the AKP, which was itself characterised
as an 'internal security threat' by Turkey’s secular establishment, battled against
the shackles put on itself for decades. There are some ironies, however, in the
fact that having upended the old politics and reduced the role of its chief
actors – big business, the military, the judiciary and the civilian
bureaucracy – to prepare Turkey for a programme that could qualify
it to join the European Union, the party has come to adopt what in many
ways is the same republican tradition, driven by a fixation on state security
at the expense of freedoms.
It has replaced 'Islamic threat' as the hot button issue
with Kurdish terrorism; frustrated the electoral process after the June 7
elections; abandoned a peace process it had initiated in 2013; and fully
converged with the Kemalist republican state tradition of refusing to discuss
the legitimacy of identities other than the officially prescribed Turkish one,
albeit with more of an infusion of Muslim identity.
The
1990s
As the party leadership became locked in a fierce military
struggle to finish off the PKK, the public mind, still haunted by the memories
of the 1990s, is deeply concerned at the
prospect of 'reliving' an era when the establishment actors and political
class addressed purely political-social problems – Kurdish nationalism and
political Islam – through national security, the National Security Council and emergency
military measures rather than through parliamentary decisions, government
policies and civilian wisdom.
As the military was the dominant factor of power in
politics, it almost fought its own war, blocking political initiatives,
refusing to define and formulate security through interagency debate with
civilians and perceiving the fight against the PKK as zero-sum warfare. The 'military
solution' perspective of the 1990s has been responsible for the decline of
democratic discourse and its replacement by repackaged conservative nationalist
ideas.
Moreover, securitisation of the issue led the
establishment to step up its ideological and emotional vigilantism over the Kurdish
deputies in the 1990s, who had ascended from a series of Kurdish parties representing the Kurdish nationalist
movement by either running as independents or on other party’s lists in
parliamentary elections.
In 1994 in a notorious incident outside the parliament building. Six Kurdish
deputies were arrested, later charged and sentenced to long years for violating
the unitary principles of the Constitution. A long series of Kurdish parties were formed
but in a quicksilver fashion they were either outlawed, or closed down by the
Constitutional Court, or simply failed to pass the 10% threshold for
entering the parliament. The opportunity created by the capture of PKK leader Ocalan in 1999
did not turn into a durable process of peace and resolution; rather, the
military acquired an increasingly influential voice in the political
calculations of Ankara. Military solutions and nationalist narratives dominated
the political discourse to the extent of becoming a kind of ‘common-sense’.
Democratic silver lining?
However, after a
long hiatus, as violence escalated and casualties soared, a silver lining
emerged: in the emerging post-Cold War realities, many sectors started to question
the military’s motives and strategies in its fight against the Kurdish
separatists. In the changing terms of debate, not only the fundamentals of the
republican approach to the Kurdish population were disputed, the idea that it is
counterintuitive to seek to manage or resolve a political problem solely by
relying on its militarisation, i.e.,
'defeating the enemy' was gradually being put on the table.
The AKP’s initiatives for 'openings' and 'negotiations for peace' arose against
this background. More significantly, however, they were compelled by practical electoral
realities rather than a full subscription to, or appreciation of, the idea that transformative
political agendas to resolve the Kurdish issue would require a redistribution
of state power to enable plural forms of governance.
The nebulous 2009 'opening' was basically built on a search for disarmament of
the PKK and promises of some unclear incremental democratic reforms. Some responsibility for pushing the party in
this direction should also be given to the party’s own Kurdish deputies, urging
the leadership for a new way of responding to the regions’ problems.
Just as government’s wish to recoup the votes it
lost in the region in the local elections of March 2009 played a major role in the
2009 opening, in the 2013 initiative, the impetus came from the government’s
wish to address an intractable conflict that was damaging the image of the new
Turkey it was trying to build.
Since almost any departure from the long-held military solution was considered
a hopeful change, these moves were welcomed by the public. The fact that the
attempts were simultaneously accompanied by promoting an Islamic brand of
'brotherly embrace and unity' policy was probably overlooked.
But Erdogan…
But the negative
narrative of Erdogan about the Kurdish movement and its party officials prior
to, during and after the June elections and his machinations to frustrate
electoral politics reveal that his commitment to a peace process was not
premised on building a sufficiently broad coalition embracing Turkey’s diverse
ideologies and groups with a democratic vocabulary to sustain the peace efforts.
On the contrary,
his readiness to circumvent even the most favored form of democracy by Turkish
politicians – elections – illustrates that promises to end the conflict were
contingent on securing a mathematically permanent conservative-nationalist
electoral bloc, one that sustains the same old state-security logic but which
is difficult to achieve in a country split down the middle. It also
illustrates the enormous ideological and structural barriers that Kurdish
parties are compelled to overcome to make their presence felt in Turkish
political life.
Is the HDP a falling shooting star?
The reversal of the HDP’s electoral fortunes in the
aftermath of the 1 November elections took place along with a sharp escalation in the violence that has
plagued the country since July 2015. Civilian casualties have been mounting;
intermittent curfews have been imposed in many cities; 200,000 people from the
region have been displaced; and many citizens have been trapped in their homes
without food, electricity and medical help. The government has enforced a blockade over internet and cell phones in
the region as well as on media reporting.
As urban warfare between the PKK and Turkish security forces
shows no signs of deescalating, HDP, as the third largest political party in
the parliament, is reduced to sustaining a balancing act which causes further
immobilisation, isolation and ineffectivity.
Its party officials are constantly harassed by the
government with threats to remove their parliamentary immunities for supporting
the PKK and/or closure of their party. Their deputies are often barred from entering cities and towns under
army curfews. Similarly, its Turkish electorate, who are unhappy about the
relentless violence by the PKK, seem to put a distance between themselves and
the party. The Kurdish loyalists in the region who are worried about their
physical day-to-day survival express rage about the party’s 'weak' narrative
and cautious engagement with their hardship.
On the other hand, the PKK, which seemed to be unhappy about
the HDP’s new global image, seems to be gaining the role of 'game changer' in
the region. It has not only established an unequivocal leverage over Kurdish
civil societal groups and formations, but has been able to sustain its main
priority – achieving some form of self-rule in the region.
As a result, it is reasonable to assume that the chances for
the HDP to carry out an effective pro-Kurdish agenda independent of the PKK are
slim. At present, the party has lost a
considerable segment of its electoral support as well as the new and broader voice of
that rebel spirit that for a while, transformed the Kurdish movement into a more
'Turkified' multi-issue party.
That said, when and if the time for peace negotiations comes,
despite its declining fortunes and unclear future, the HDP is still the only
notable civilian representative of the Kurdish movement which is capable of sitting
at the table and representing a humane
and intellectual face for the Kurdish conflict.
Placed alongside Turkey’s grim political treatment of the
representation of Kurdish interests, the rainbow coalition which the HDP has
achieved and the new democratic blueprint it laid out for Turks and Kurds in
June 2015 left an indelible mark on Turkey’s imagination and presented an
unprecedented leap in its history. In no small measure,
its ability to rebound from the deep crisis in which it is engulfed depends precisely
on its capacity to reignite the same hopes across the political-social spectrum
via its inspiring leader, honest appeal, and a democracy- and
citizen-security-centred narrative.
Meanwhile
There are some intriguing questions regarding the nature of
the convergence of the AKP with its once-adversary, the historical bastion of the
secular republic, the Turkish military.
It is true that Erdogan’s all out war with the ferocious PKK
has brought the high command to the forefront once more. What is different from the 1990s, however, is
that since the AKP’s military reforms have caused the military to retreat from its
role and influence in politics, the government and the high command are on the
same page regarding the strength of their nationalism and anti-PKK sentiment.
There is no reason to think that the military’s own ‘political’ calculus can
override the civilian will.
A particularly striking manifestation of the problematic
nature of the government’s warfare is Turkey’s increasing estrangement from the west. It seems reasonable to think that there is a
causality between the AKP’s security-centered drift from the hallmarks of
western democracy and its visible rupture from the west where Turkey was
once held in regard as a catalyst for
regional stability.
As Turkey’s role as a stabilising force in one of the most
unstable regions of the world wanes, and condemnation of ‘the west’ and EU-fatigue
set in, the war against domestic and external enemies escalates.
This article is published in association with the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, which is seeking to contribute to public knowledge about effective democracy-strengthening by leading a discussion on openDemocracy about what approaches work best. Views expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those of WFD. WFD’s programmes bring together parliamentary and political party expertise to help developing countries and countries transitioning to democracy.