The Turkish presidential elections last Sunday, in which Recep Tayyip Erdogan prevailed, already have their first political victim. But it is not about the candidate Kemal Kiliçdaroglu -who on election night neither resigned nor congratulated the winner- but about one of his main external supporters. Selahattin Demirtas, the charismatic jailed figure of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) is leaving politics.
This has been communicated in a letter provided to the media by Demirtas, 49. In it, he also charges against his formation campaign, which has lost hundreds of thousands of votes and several deputies compared to 2018, when he was – from his cell – one of the six presidential candidates.
Demirtas was jailed at the end of 2016, accused of inciting with his speeches the riots that, two years earlier, had caused between 43 and 53 deaths – the majority Kurds – in southeastern Turkey. At that time, the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobane was besieged by the Islamic State and the Turkish army prevented Kurdish-Turkish militiamen from crossing the border to their aid.
It so happened that Demirtas could have been imprisoned because, a few months earlier, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), already headed by Kiliçdaroglu, had united its votes with those of the government majority so that, with a two-thirds majority, The Constitution could be amended. The objective was none other than to allow the lifting of the immunity of dozens of HDP deputies “in order to investigate alleged terrorist links.” That is, with the guerrilla of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
The European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2020 against that lifting of parliamentary immunity and urged Turkey to release Demirtas. However, on the same election night on Sunday, Erdogan, before tens of thousands of supporters cheering him in front of the presidential palace in Ankara, explicitly referred to Selahattin Demirtas. “He will never be released as long as he is president,” he said, as the crowd demanded “the death penalty for Selo” (alias for the Zaza-speaking politician, who identifies as Kurdish).
The HDP, whose candidates presented themselves under the acronym of the Green Left Party (YSP) to avoid a possible ban, obtained 4.8 million votes in the last legislative elections, one million fewer votes than in 2018, despite to much higher turnout (almost five million more voters). It is also true that in western towns the votes and deputies went to its coalition partner, the Workers’ Party of Turkey (TIP), but the setback is clear.
So much so that, if it had not been for the legislative change introduced a few months ago by the government majority – which, after 40 years, lowered the threshold to obtain representation from 10% to 7% of the votes throughout the country – the left Kurdish could today be extra-parliamentary. Although it barely exceeds 10% adding the votes of the TIP and other communist parties, on its own it barely collected 8.8%.
In any case, the Kurdish lace in Turkey is not even openly recognized as a political problem, despite the differential vote in the southeast of the country. The opposition itself, defeated in the elections, had not formulated the slightest proposal to address the problem, although a pact that would facilitate releases was taken for granted.
The tactical support of the Kurdish front for the CHP candidate has been much more open this time than in the municipal elections of 2018, when the opposition thus managed to wrest the mayoralties of Istanbul and Ankara from the Islamo-Democrats.
The explicit request for a vote by Demirtas for his countryman Kiliçdaroglu (from the same remote province of Dersim) would have had negative effects, since it has been successfully instrumentalized by Erdogan’s party, which has associated rally after rally with his rival from CHP with “the terrorists”.
The Kurdish movement itself also has reason to reflect, starting with the decline in electoral support, despite its demographic growth. It seems that the lack of their own candidate would have initially demotivated a part of their electorate, reluctant to vote for the Kemalists – Turkish nationalists, however secular they may be – for “tactical” reasons. To make matters worse, Kiliçdaroglu’s pact with the Turkish extreme right for the second round, in order to herd votes from the third eliminated candidate, demobilized even more Kurdish nationalists. Between 5% and 10%, depending on the provinces.
