QAMISHLI, Syria (North Press) – Turkey’s pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP)could be barred from running for the 2023 Turkish presidential and parliamentary elections as Turkey’s Constitutional Court could dissolve the party on the basis of bogus terror and criminal charges.
On January 5, the Court ruled in a narrow eight to seven split to freeze the HDP’s bank accounts.
Turkish newspapers report that the party was due to receive 539 million Turkish liras (nearly $29 million) in treasury funding this year, though its members say their party’s only other source of revenue are voter donations.
The move against the third-largest force in Turkey’s parliament comes only months before the country is set to hold parallel parliamentary and presidential elections on June 18.
HDP first took part in elections in 2014. During the general election four years later the party won 12 percent of the vote and holds 56 of the parliament’s 579 seats.
Awakening the Beast
First attempts at shutting down the party occurred in 2021 and were reignited after the pro-Kurdish party decided to field its own candidate for this year’s presidential election.
In March 2021, a prosecutor filed a case against the HDP seeking to ban the party over alleged ties to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a party branded as terrorist by Turkey, the US, and the European Union (EU).
That same month, Turkey’s parliament stripped Omer Faruk Gergerlioglu, HDP’s deputy and human rights advocate, of his seat over a criminal conviction for ‘spreading terrorist propaganda’ on a social media post.
The Constitutional Court accepted the indictment in June 2021. Since then, thousands of HDP members have been tried, mainly on terror-related charges. The HDP denies such charges categorically. Observers say Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in a bid to retain power, seems adamant to sideline any possible opposition.
In mid-December 2022, Ekrem Imamoglu, the mayor of Istanbul and a member of the main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), was sentenced to two years, seven months and 15 days for calling members of Turkey’s Supreme Election Council “fools” in a press release three years ago.
Yet the prosecution may have had ulterior motives. Imamoglu was also seen as the most promising contender to defeat the Turkish President in the coming elections.
In 2019, Imamoglu won control of Turkey’s largest city in a landslide, a post which had been held by Erdogan’s Justice and Development (AKP) for years.
With just a few months remaining, Erdogan is leaving nothing to chance in the coming presidential elections as he eyes a third term in office.
Yet in the eastern Kurdish-majority provinces, where Erdogan’s AKP used to garner important Kurdish votes to ensure his win, things have changed.
The HDP has rejected joining the government’s bloc or the newly-formed opposition alliance (the ‘Table of Six’), and is heading its own coalition instead. A nominee has yet to be named.
“We will name our candidate soon and run in the elections,” Pervin Buldan, HDP co-chair, said during a party event in the eastern city of Kars. This announcement follows one in October, when the party established principles for nominating a running candidate.
However, the Constitutional Court’s decision could be critical. Should it decide in the government’s favor, all HPD members would be barred from engaging in politics for a period of five years. Many of them are already imprisoned. A blanket ban would disenfranchise millions of voters, especially in the Kurdish-majority provinces.
History repeats itself
Party bans are not a strange occurrence in Turkey. Erdogan’s Islamist-rooted AKP itself survived a closure in 2008. While previously it was mostly Islamist parties who were targeted, this time, the ban could target the left-wing and pro-minority HDP.
Yet it would not be the first Kurdish party to endure this fate. Over half a dozen have already been closed down.
In 1991, the People’s Labor Party (HEP) became the first Kurdish party to enter parliament. It was outlawed in 1993.
Also in 1991, Leyla Zana, a Kurdish female politician of the Democracy Party (DEP), drew backlash when she performed part of her swearing-in ceremony in her mother tongue. Zana and others were arrested over “treason and separatism,” serving ten years in prison. The party itself was banned in 1994.
Nearly a decade later, under AKP rule, the People’s Democracy Party (HADEP), founded on Oct. 24, 1997, was criminalized in 2003 by the Constitutional Court.
The HDP is the seventh party to enter the Turkish parliament. It could also become the seventh Kurdish party to be banned.
The Third Path
The HDP has abstained from siding either with the government or with the opposition in what could be a historic turning point for the country. Asked about it, HDP representatives argued that they reached out to both blocs, but had received no response. The HDP has been sidelined by the hyper-nationalistic rhetoric of the AKP and its junior coalition partner, the far-right MHP party. Since then, the HDP has been vocal about the government’s policies.
The July 2022 bombing of a tourist resort in Zakho, in the Kurdish Region of Iraq (KRI), was a turning point. The Iraqi authorities filed a complaint to the UN Security Council asking for an investigation to the deadly bombing and put the blame squarely on Turkey. Erdogan, however, accused the PKK of being behind the attack. The HDP stated that the Turkish government was politically and legally responsible for the massacre at Zakho.
These remarks did not go unnoticed by Turkish parties on either side of the political divide. As Turkish soldiers battle Kurdish fighters in the KRI and continually attack Kurdish targets in northern Syria (known to Kurds as Rojava), nationalist discourse in Turkey is at an all-time high.
Table-of-six against one-man rule
The ‘Table of Six’ alliance running against Erdogan includes secularists, nationalists, Islamists, and liberals, but no HDP. The six-way opposition alliance main goal is to end what it calls Erdogan’s “one-man rule”.
It is made up of the Kemalist Republican People’s Party (CHP), the nationalist Good Party (IYI), the center-right Democrat Party (DP), the Muslim-conservative Felicity Party (SP), the liberal Democracy and Progress Party (DEVA) and the conservative Future Party (GELECEK).
Its 10-article list of principles and objectives includes a return to the parliamentary system based on the principle of separation of powers and an upgrade on democracy and human rights.
The six parties have a combined support of about 40 percent of the voting public – short of the absolute majority needed to win the presidency. Furthermore, the star-packed alliance still needs to decide on an electable leader.
Hitting at the alliance, Erdogan has mused “there were candidates before us in previous presidential elections. Now four, five months are left until the election, and still no candidates have emerged”.
“They set up a table, there are six people around and there is yet another, making seven, who is invisible,” Erdogan joked, referring to the HDP.
The alliance is still deciding on a candidate that will be able to implement the six parties’ agendas.
Sultan-makers
In November 2002, only a year and two months after it was founded, the AKP defied all expectations by winning 35 percent of the seats in the parliament.
A center-right Islamist party, the AKP emerged from the reformist wing of the banned Islamic Virtue Party (FP) and was held together by a coalition of politicians, many of whom were former supporters of Turgut Ozal – half Kurdish himself – and Necmettin Erbakan’s Welfare Party (RP) in the 1980s and 1990s.
In previous elections – notably under the AKP’s rise to power – Turkey’s Kurdish voters have decided the winners of Turkish national elections. This year, too, neither one of the main blocs is likely to reach 50 percent of votes, putting the HDP in the position of kingmaker. This year things are set to change.
Yet recent moves by the AKP could leave millions of Kurdish voters undecided and sidelined in the current elections. Most observers agree that this would benefit the incumbent government.
With Imamoglu out of the way, and an HDP suspended from running, the way could be cleared for Erdogan to remain in office for a third term.
Turkey is at a crossroads; the coming presidential election is likely to shape Turkish policies for the next century. In Turkey’s collective imagination, the year 2023 is a symbolic one. It marks a century since the abolition of the Ottoman Empire and the Treaty of Lausanne, out of which the current Turkish Republic was born.
Ironically, at that decisive period of Lausanne and juncture of a changing world, prior to and during the First World War, and, when the Ottoman Empire was on the decline the Kurds remained in the Turkish fold, however, when the Nationalist Turks rose steadily to the power in the aftermath of the war, the Kurds left that fold. What a paradox that ensued long decades of political rift in a region seemingly doomed to remain unsettled.
In 2021, Pervin Buldan and Mithat Sancar, the HDP co-chairs, declared that if the party were to be shut down, members of the HDP would re-group under a different banner. They certainly have done it before. But with elections just a few months out, they could be short of time and squeezed into the corner.