On May 14, Kurds, like their peers, will go to the polls in Turkey. As it stands, the elections may end the 20-year rule of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his AK Party. If this feat was to be achieved, it would be in no small part due to Turkey’s roughly 15 million Kurds. But who they will cast their ballots for is anything but obvious. Kurds in Turkey are much less a monolithic voting bloc than either pro- or anti-Kurdish factions may want to portray them as. The AKP has been the party most-voted by Kurds in all but one election in the past two decades. On the other hand, it took until 2015 for a pro-Kurdish party to garner a majority of Kurdish votes for the first time in Turkey’s history. Neither is there a clear trajectory, as Turkey’s Kurds have switched allegiances repeatedly in the past few years alone. What, if anything, can one discern about the Kurds’ voting patterns?
History of Kurds in Turkish politics
In the 2018 general elections, just over half the electorate of the 15 Kurdish-majority provinces of southeast Turkey (Agri, Van, Bitlis, Hakkari, Sirnak, Siirt, Mardin, Batman, Diyarbakir, Bingol, Tunceli, and Saliurfa) voted for the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). The AKP received around a third of the vote, with just under 1.5 million ballots cast for Erdogan’s party. These may be dwarfed by the over 21 million votes for the AKP nationwide, yet they are far from inconsequential. The 2017 referendum – an AKP initiative which turned Turkey from a parliamentary to a presidential system – was won by a margin of less than 1.4 million votes. It would take just 1.8 million people to switch their allegiance in order for the ruling majority in parliament to become a minority – or around the same number of votes the AKP and its junior partner in parliament, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), received in the southeast in 2018. Meanwhile, the main opposition coalition – the National Alliance – received only 260,000 votes in these Kurdish-majority provinces. Thus, as it stands, the Turkish opposition against Erdogan cannot hope to command any support among the Kurds in the southeast without aid from the HDP.
However, the Kurds’ political influence reaches well beyond the Kurdish-majority southeast. Nearly 3 million Kurds live in Istanbul alone, making it not only the world’s ‘largest Kurdish city’, but also the single largest source of support for the HDP. At 1.2 million votes cast in 2018, Istanbul province netted the pro-Kurdish party more votes than Diyarbakir, Sanliurfa, and Van – the three largest provinces in the southeast – combined. Yet, in 2015, only about a quarter of Istanbul’s Kurds voted for the HDP, with much of the rest lending their support to the AKP. How did it come to this?
Kurdish political consciousness predates the Turkish Republic, yet Kurdish political organizations did not become a significant player in Turkish elections until much later. First attempts to form Kurdish parties were made in the mid- to late-sixties, influenced by Kurdish liberation struggles across the border. But they remained elitist and illegal. From the 1980s onward, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) launched an insurgency against rivalling parties, Kurdish landlords and the Turkish state. Together with the government’s brutal crackdown, it began to politicize Turkey’s Kurds.
A series of short-lived pro-Kurdish parties sprung up in the 1990, closed down by Turkish courts almost as soon as they gained any traction in Turkish politics. Beginning with the People’s Labour Party (HEP) in 1990, these parties were openly pro-Kurdish and advocated for economic and security rights for the southeast, even as the state still outlawed Kurdish language and identity. Unlike their predecessors, they were leftist and many of their politicians harboured sympathies for – if not connections to – the PKK.
Yet popular parties they were not. In 1992, a Gallup poll showed that a mere 9.1 percent of Turkey’s Kurds felt represented by the HEP. The PKK – in fact the first Kurdish insurgency not based on a religious foundation, but rather on the Marxist-Leninist tradition – was no exception. Only 29.2 percent of respondents said the armed group represented them in the same poll. Kurds in Turkey remained statistically more religious and conservative than their Turkish peers. In the mid-1990s, the PKK went as far as to embrace Islam as part of their discourse, heading all documents with a pious bismillairrahamanirrahim. To little avail: at the 1995 elections, the Welfare Party (RP), a Turkish Islamist party, won 27.8 percent of the votes in the southeast; People’s Democracy Party (HADEP), the latest pro-Kurdish entity, received only 20 percent.
Far from being the only Kurdish insurrectionist party, the PKK was also rivalled by Kurdish Hezbollah, an armed group founded in 1983, which combined Salafism with Kurdish liberation struggle. While also a fringe group, its political wing – HUDA PAR – remains active in Turkish politics to this day.
AKP and Kurds
It is thus little surprise that Erdogan and his AKP were embraced by Turkey’s Kurds in 2002. After nearly a decade of fear-mongering, wanton killing of Kurds, and an embrace of Turanist chauvinism, it is easy to forget that Erdogan was promising real change at the turn of the millennium. His two-pronged approach united populist Islamist conservatism with economic liberalism. For the country’s conservative Kurds, Erdogan promised to dissolve ethnic-based differences under the umbrella of a pan-Islamic identity, as well as to redistribute the nation’s wealth as part of his anti-elitist economic policy. For working-class Kurds in the urban centers of the country’s west, who had been displaced by the Turkish army’s brutal crackdown against the PKK and decades of economic underdevelopment in the southeast, Erdogan’s policies were especially appealing. As impoverished immigrants in predominantly-Turkish cities, they hoped to reduce ethnic friction and improve upwards mobility.
In the mid-aughts, Erdogan made significant strides towards ‘settling the Kurdish question’. The AKP legalized Kurdish education in 2004 and launched a Kurdish-language state television channel (TRT 6, later became TRT KURDI) in 2009. In 2005, Erdogan made the ‘Kurdish question’ a priority, promising to “resolve this problem with more democracy, better citizenship rights and more wealth.” He also established a number social programmes that disproportionally benefitted the impoverished southeast. Finally, beginning in 2013, the AKP government and the PKK attempted to craft a lasting peace.
Yet this process would come to an abrupt end in July 2015. The reasons why are multiple. For one, the AKP was politically embattled. It was torn between Turkey’s liberal wing, which had staged large protests at the Gezi park in Istanbul in 2013; the Gulenists, adherents to a Muslim cleric who had come to dominate many civil and military structures in the country and had staged a judicial coup against the AKP; as well as the Kurds themselves.
Erdogan had severely underestimated the effects of its 2014 blockade of Kobani, a Kurdish town across the border, where the PKK and its Syrian allies – the People’s/Women’s Protection Units (YPG/YPJ) – were involved in a life-or-death battle against the Islamic State (ISIS). The PKK’s sister party, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), had established autonomous Kurdish cantons in Syria in 2012 – the Turkish political establishment feared the effect it could have on Kurds domestically. The response to the government’s blockade was stark, even among religious Kurds and Kurds living in western Turkey. The perceived alliance between ISIS and the Turkish state, as well as rising anti-Kurdish violence, galvanized more Kurds to vote for the HDP, which had been established in 2012 – the eight iteration of the leftist, pro-Kurdish camp since the launch of the HEP in 1990. Votes for the HDP increased from 2.3 million in 2011 to 3.2 million in 2015. The lion’s share of converts were not in the southeast, however, but in the predominantly-Kurdish, working-class suburbs of Istanbul, Ankara, and other Turkish urban centers.
The AKP failed to form a government after the elections in June 2015. After calling for fresh elections in November, the AKP was forced to ally with the MHP, a far-right party which rejected any concessions to Turkey’s Kurds, in order to retain its majority in parliament. Researchers Onur Gunay and Erdem Yoruk also found that the AKP’s rhetoric shifted significantly to the right between the two elections. From June to November, the AKP’s share of non-Turkish voters dropped from 19 percent to 10.
Paradoxically, however, less people voted for the HDP and more for the AKP in November than June. According to the German Marshal Fund of the United States, a think-tank, support for Erdogan among Turkey’s Kurds rose by an additional 10 points between November 2015 and the 2017 constitutional referendum, which concentrated power in the hands of the AKP leader.
Much of this reversal can be attributed to the HDP’s unilateral decision to declare autonomy across a number of municipalities and provinces of the southeast in the summer of 2015. This also allowed the PKK to make a comeback. In Tunceli (Dersim), PKK militants established checkpoints on the roads in and out of the region. Yet Turkey is not Syria, and a brutal government crackdown followed. Cities like Sur (Diyarbakir), Cizre, and Nusaybin were almost entirely levelled. The UN and human rights groups described “hundreds of unlawful killings” by Turkish forces and the displacement of at least 335,000 people from Kurdish-majority regions. In 2016, the government deposed 34 democratically-elected HDP representatives (later that number would jump to over 100), arrested the party’s leadership, and closed down hundreds of Kurdish and leftist NGOs.
Much of the gains the HDP had made were reversed after the government’s bloody response. The state narrative alleges conservative Kurds were put off by the violence and blamed the PKK, as well as the HDP, for the break-down in diplomacy. The accusation is not entirely wrong – the HDP’s politics are not in line with many Kurds, and a large number continued to vote for the AKP. However, the reasons for the ongoing support for the AKP are most likely material and security-based, as the southeast had been devastated by the insurgency. Moreover, they signalled support for Erdogan against the coup plotters of 2016 – made up of Gulenists and the army establishment – who they deemed worse than Erdogan.