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rfmcdonaldAt Open Democracy, Harriet Fildes argues that Turkey's People's Democratic Party, which made breakthroughs in the Turkish elections, is critically important for Turkish democracy, both for including Kurds and new social movements.
The increased salience of the People’s Democracy Party (the HDP) in Turkish domestic politics will be a wild card in the June elections. Previously a highly marginalized party predominantly aimed at ensuring and protecting Kurdish rights, in recent years (and particularly since Gezi Park), the HDP has begun to appeal to a much broader spectrum of Turkish society, and has finally entered into the normative battle taking place over Turkey’s public sphere as one of the main runners in what is now a four party race.
Controversially in this year’s elections, the HDP will run as a party in their first attempt to break Turkey’s punitive electoral threshold in 13 years, which currently stands at 10 percent - the highest in Europe. In order to achieve this formidable task they will need to pull support from both the ruling party (the AKP) and from the main opposition party (the CHP). This was previously assumed to be impossible due to the enduring animosity bordering on xenophobia between nationalists (particularly Kemalists) and Kurds. But now it seems to be a viable goal. The widened appeal of the HDP can be attributed in no small part to a successful re-branding campaign. More commonly known by their nom de guerre; the BDP (Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi), they have decided to run under the western front of the HDP, perhaps due to the association amongst some sections of society between the BDP and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (the PKK). Whichever way you look at it, this is a departure from the party’s ethnic-based political history. It also signals a swing in geographical focus, away from the party’s traditional roots (and electorate) in the Kurdish dominated south-east of the country (these votes are largely secure) toward the west - aiming to collect leftist or liberal voters disenchanted with the nationalism and conservatism of the main political parties. The success of Demirtaş in the presidential elections, during which he received nearly 10 percent of the national vote, shows the increasing ability of the HDP to do precisely this.
This transformation of state-society and society-society relations could be seen as a by-product of the Gezi Park protests, arising from the increased understanding of the structural violence felt by Kurdish communities amongst broad segments of society. Not only did citizens, most of whom had never attended a protest before, experience firsthand the physical violence extended by the state to peaceful protesters, they also gained an understanding of the more ubiquitous discursive violence disseminated by the state’s disciplinary apparatus; the neo-liberal media, whose failure to objectively report on the protests shed some light on issues suffered by Kurds for decades. As Figen Yüksekdağ, the Co-Chair of the HDP, asserted; “All components of the HDP are Gezi protestors, they are the subjects of Gezi.”
