Turkey's Kurds and the election threshold

Residents of the Kurdish Question galaxy recently invented an interesting challenge by replacing the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) with the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP). In an instant, they completely forgot about the reconciliation process to create an absurd gap between their physical location and the fictional universe they invented. At this point, the Kurdish political movement is gradually drifting away from the socio-economic circumstances, culture, political priorities and demands of its social base. Nowadays, they desperately want the best of both worlds: In predominantly Kurdish constituencies, they seek to make up for their shortcomings with late nationalism, and at the same time, their campaign in Western provinces taps into their audience's hate of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Right now, the idea is to promote the HDP at the expense of Turkey's Kurds.

First they resorted to cliches by claiming that Kurds would pass the national election threshold if and only if the HDP campaign becomes successful, which is just a nice way of turning the guardianship regime's assimilationist argument around. Needless to say, the vast majority of the Kurdish community never had any problems with the threshold. The Justice and Development Party (AK Party), which most Kurds have been supporting, not only passed the electoral threshold with relative ease but also managed to tear down the guardianship regime.

The political situation is not new. Nor will things change if the HDP passes the threshold. If the party succeeds, a group of voters, which includes some Kurds, will have supported a movement with more than 10 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, the HDP has already made it clear that it aims to merely facilitate a coalition government rather than attain greater influence by claiming additional seats in Parliament. What makes matters worse is that many people tend to associate the HDP's ability to pass the threshold with the party's alleged effort to evolve into a nationwide movement. By making the association itself, observers inherently acknowledge the party's troubles with normalization, which, they hope, can miraculously disappear by breaking the 10 percent mark.

Furthermore, it is important to question whether the Kurds, who have largely been reduced to passive bystanders or new recruits will claim the victory if the HDP ends up above the threshold. Provided that the party will survive next weekend's general election, keeping two distinct audiences together will prove more challenging than forming an impromptu alliance on the campaign trail. Needless to say, such an outcome would do more harm to the reconciliation process than anything else. In other words, the HDP has evolved into a thinly veiled effort to abandon the disarmament talks.

The AK Party's constant demonization by the HDP leadership coupled with the party's eagerness to facilitate a coalition government effectively mean that the movement has no further interest in pursuing peace. The question is quite simple: Why else would the HDP target a political party committed to resolving the Kurdish question? At this point, the movement has no rational response to offer except to acknowledge that the HDP takes issue with the reconciliation process itself. Surely enough, though, it would be wrong to hold the Kurdish people accountable for the party's irresponsible behavior. Instead, the current situation reveals that new recruits have defaced the movement in an irreversible way.

The neo-PKK mindset, which has conveniently associated election results with the future of the reconciliation process, has nothing to offer but to either facilitate a coalition government or break the cease-fire. Either way, their top priority is to derail the reconciliation process.

The HDP's emphasis on the election threshold will continue to become increasingly meaningless unless they can come up with a convincing reason to account for their opposition to the Reconciliation Process. Even worse, little is left to say about the political suicide that the Kurdish political movement has committed.