The HDP may be the key party

Ahmet İnsel

Yayınlanma: 06.05.2018 - 08:57
Abone Ol google-news

The single-man-focused alliance in the 24 June elections was cemented with the BBP joining the alliance between the AKP and MHP that was formed after the 2015 elections and has gone from strength to strength. The entity named the People’s Alliance conforms to a large extent to the mental map of the nationalist-pious movements that were reinforced in Turkey in the most animated period of the cold war and essentially feeds on that memory and those reflexes.

AKP staff must have discounted the possibility that the incongruous five on the opposition would form an alliance given that they maintained the ten per cent threshold and devised this method to save the MHP and this party alone from falling below the threshold. They gave rise to a development that was totally unexpected on their part. Out of sheer desperation, four of the incongruous five lined up in a nationalist-conservative alliance with democratic overtones in opposition to Erdoganism. All of a sudden, the possibility beckoned of the Erdoğan alliance losing its majority in parliament.

But, one more indispensable precondition stands in the way of this possibility becoming reality: the HDP crossing the threshold. Everyone knows that if the HDP fails to cross the threshold, the large majority of the seats it should take will go the AKP and the AKP may, thanks to this, attain a sole majority in parliament even if it does not get enough votes. And, in the event that Erdoğan is elected president, there will remain no possibility within parliamentary politics of halting the “presidential system of government” that will go down in the political literature as Erdoganism.

Despite this risk that does not merit underestimation under state of emergency conditions and in the environment of severe duress on the HDP, the counter-alliance whose centre of gravity is in the CHP started out with claims of it being a “zero threshold alliance” and ended up being formed with the HDP excluded. The fact that the strongest alliance in this country is the Sunni Turk alliance thus found concrete expression once more. The shared basis of the Erdoğan-centred People’s Alliance and the as-yet unnamed counter-alliance is the Turkishness Alliance that yet again bears out the conclusions of Barış Ünlü’s Dictionary of Turkishness (Dipnot Publications, 2018). This permanent alliance, which in the past operated against non-Muslims, holds equal sway in both alliances in opposition to the demand of the Kurds of Turkey who today constitute a community making up close to one-fifth of the population to be equal citizens of Turkey while preserving their Kurdish identity. However, there is also desertion from this Turkishness alliance. It is not insignificant that a considerable section of the CHP and SP is positively inclined towards the HDP’s inclusion in the electoral alliance. On the other hand, this exclusion opens up a very broad political space in front of the HDP. It presents it with the opportunity to be the centre of gravity of a strong left movement demanding solidarity, equality, freedom and democracy for all citizens, while neither forgetting nor denying issues of identity nor making them the sole dominant theme of the political space. A left alliance that forms around the HDP may, without giving a fillip to the seemingly radical and essentially egocentric political discourse of tiny grouplets, be the key party for halting Erdoganism and returning to democracy.

For Demirtaş to capture a higher vote than he obtained in 2014 in the first round of the presidential contest and for the HDP to cross the threshold and form a strong group in parliament will not suffice to enable the single-man authoritarianism that is strangling Turkey and the Erdoganism whose introduction is sought to be withstood, but they amount to an indispensable precondition for this. Responsibility now rests not only on the HDP, but on the shoulders of all who have surmounted nationalist reflexes and the fears on which the Turkishness alliance thrives and truly believe in democracy, equality and freedom.

 HDP kilit parti olabilir

 


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