The HDP, founded by the Kurd Selahattin Demirtas in 2012, has managed to evolve politically and is now appreciated even by the young secular population.
It may seems strange that one of the most modern and secular political movements of the entire Eastern Mediterranean should developed in one of the poorest areas of the region – Turkish Kurdistan – just a stone’s throw from Syria, blighted by authoritarianism and fundamentalist movements and Iraqi Kurdistan, economically advanced but still managed politically along clan and tribal lines. Yet, even with a fair share of its leadership in prison and an electoral law that weighted against the territories where the Kurds are a majority, in the last round of elections held last June the Democratic Party of the People (in Kurdish: “Partiya Demokratîk a Gelan”, in Turkish: “Halkların Demokratik Partisi” – HDP) managed to overcome the extremely selectivecut-off quota of 10% foreseen by the Turkish system, and thus enter parliament once more. To get a measure o the success of this relatively young movement, founded in 2012, and of its charismatic leader Selahattin Demirtaş, in the heart of an increasingly conservative area of the world, one must necessarily take a step back and look at the development of Kurdish politics within modern day Turkey.
We could describe it as “political evolutionism”. Meaning the capacity of certain movements to be born and adjust conditions of the surrounding environment much like living organisms. And if its Kurdish movements having to survive in contemporary Turkey, then that environment is particularly hostile. An environment that currently, if seen from outside,would seem to feature a head-to-head between a conservative – and victorious – ‘right wing’ dominated by the Justice and Development party (Adaletve Kalkınma Partisi – AKP) of Islamic persuasion and by its leader, the current president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and a secular ‘left wing’, essentially elitist and Bourgeois, mainly concentrated in the cities along the western seaboard and that looks to Europe for inspiration. This is a description that certainly contains elements of truth, but it overlooks a factor that in Europe we’re not used to take into consideration – or at least not until a few years ago – or that we assign exclusively to the moreconservative right wing factions: nationalism.
What often escapes us is the intrinsically nationalistic character of the entire Turkish political environment, which applies to all of today’s parties and movements with any kind of electoral following. It is primarily so for the republicans of the People’s Republican Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi– CHP), currently the main opposition party which bases its political message on the modernist nationalism of Kemal Ataturk. the nation’s founder. A form of nationalism that stresses the exclusively Turkish nature of the Republic as opposed to its multi-ethnic Ottoman past and its attempts at European colonisation. A nationalism that yearned for a secular and nationalist future partly in order to move away from the multi-identitarian universalism of the Ottoman caliphate. This is the main ideological basis which, in its various manifestations, has been dominant in Turkey ever since the advent of the AKP and Erdogan. Clearly this approach did not leave much room for manoeuvre for the many minorities still to be found in Turkey, especially those that were territorially and numerically significant like the Kurds, which account for approximately a quarter of the population and boast majorities in much of the eastern regions of the country. However, during the Cold War this ideology naturally enough felt drawn to the Western bloc, which Ataturk viewed as his frame of reference in order to promote the modernisation of Turkish society.
Conversely, in the Eighties this ideological and repressive nationalism that sided with the West provided the perfect foil for the opposition of the Kurdish Worker’s Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê – PKK),which gained ground particularly among the Kurdish-Turkish population. A movement that mingled ‘reactionary’ nationalism with the international socialism of the Eastern Block and that therefore tended to represent the Kurdish population as an almost perfect opposition to the dominant ideology of a state that they often felt treated them as second class citizens.
But the PKK is not just a movement that enjoyed considerable success among the Kurdish electorate before the advent of the HDP. Over the last two decades, most of the Kurdish electorate has in fact opted for another movement that was opposed to Ataturk’s historical nationalism and that was instead inspired by the multi-ethnic tolerance of Turkey’s Ottoman past: Erdogan’s AKP. Although it may seem unbelievable today, over the last two decades the AKP has constantly proven to be the favourite party among the Kurdish minorities, as it provided a better representation of their religious and conservative stances than the extreme left wing movements like the PKK, while opposing the traditional nationalist parties that had dominated the scene for most of the time since the founding of the Turkish Republic. Half way through the Noughties the AKP seemed intent on meeting these expectations and began a process of reconciliation with the Turkish minorities. It thus made the first real attempt to close the bloody chapter of the insurgence led by the PKK by opening a dialogue directly with its leadership, starting with its historic leader Abdullah Ocalan, held in the Imrali jail since 1999, but still very influential among the Kurdish public opinion. An attempt that almost achieved a definitive peace, at least until the breakout of the Syrian crisis and the first serious problems that undermined the solidity of the AKP’s power. The clash with the religious movement led by Fethullah Gulen, which up until then had been one of the pillars of Erdogan’s power, led to an internal conflict within the religious electorate and the bureaucratic-military apparatus of the state, mostly controlled by Gulen’s powerful organisation. And it was at this point that Erdogan and the AKP found themselves forced to build new alliances and develop a new rhetoric to retain power in the country; and this was the beginning of the nationalist ‘reversal’ operated by the AKP and its convergence towards the more hard-core wing of the former Grey Wolves, now represented by the Nationalist movement(Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi – MHP) led by Devlet Bahçeli.
A convergence that was at first tentative and then became outright following the alliance signed by the two formations during the latest electoral campaign. This wasn’t just a shift of alliances but also of rhetoric, in which the Islamic element merged with the nationalist and militarist approach that has enabled Erdogan to overcome the harsh internal conflict with Gulen’s movement unscathed, while the latter, according to the official narrative, was also responsible for the attempted coup in July 2016. However, this new alliance had to be sanctioned with a ‘sacrifice’: the end of the hard-earned peace process with the Kurds, which had never gone down too well with the nationalist electorate. A sacrifice that was all the more urgent following the conquests made by the militias of the Syrian YPG, which the Turks believe to by the Syrian wing of the PKK, in large parts of northern Syria, from which militant Kurds used to launch their offensives in Turkish territory in the Eighties. And it is the very failure of the peace process and the return to a new dominant nationalist rhetoric that can partly explain the recent success of the HDP, initially in the 2015 elections and then again in 2018. A party born in 2012 to unite the Kurdish left and provide representation to what had been the main popular base of the PKK, is today the only truly anti-nationalist formation within the Turkish political spectrum. A political animal, therefore, that is alien to today’s Turkey, and for that very reason its modernist and tolerant message has managed to attract a considerable swathe of young voters of Turkish origin who don’t approve of the nationalistic and religious path their country is currently travelling down.
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The HDP, founded by the Kurd Selahattin Demirtas in 2012, has managed to evolve politically and is now appreciated even by the young secular population.
