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Southeast Europe
May 11, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 14
The Kurdish gamble
IntelliNews Pro
By the end of May 9, the roster will be complete. People in Turkey have until 8pm local time to gather the 100,000 signatures that independ- ent candidates need to run for president in next month’s election.
One woman and four or possibly five men will be on the ballot on June 24. That makes it – on paper, at least – the most competitive presidential election yet.
But Turkish election campaigns have long been fought on an uneven playing field.
Successive reports by OSCE monitors have docu- mented how Turkey’s governing AK Party repeat- edly used its grip over newspapers and broadcast- ers and its control of state institutions to pass
its message to Turkish voters at the opposition’s expense.
This election will be the most uneven yet and that is because of the plight of the Peoples’ Democrat- ic Party (HDP), a left-wing outfit that is the most successful Kurdish political movement Turkey has ever seen.
The party confounded expectations by emerging from the last election three years ago as the third- largest in parliament. Since then, however, its influence has dwindled: amid accusations of col- lusion with the PKK, a Kurdish militant group that Turkey considers a terrorist organisation, parlia- ment waived HDP MPs’ immunity from criminal prosecution and allowed the police to swoop in.
Nearly all of the party’s 59 members of parlia- ment have been arrested, charged or sentenced to lengthy prison terms. By one measure, just eight of its MPs have not spent at least some time in police custody since they were elected in 2015.
One former leader, Selahattin Demirtas, was
the HDP’s candidate for president in 2014 and is standing this time too. But a stuttering trial –
on charges of glorifying terrorism, among oth- ers – has kept him behind bars for 18 months. He won’t be released to join the election campaign.
Despite the gloom, Turkey’s Kurdish population remains a potent electoral force – especially in the southeast of the country, in those districts that are