Turkey’s Kurdish areas serve as petri dish for illiberal democracy test

The tables were crammed with men playing dominoes at a popular kirthaane, or traditional coffee house, in the Kurdish stronghold of Diyarbakir in southeastern Turkey when the polls closed at 5pm local time in the country’s crunch presidential runoff.

By 6.30pm, the domino sets were abandoned as all eyes turned to the TV screen broadcasting live coverage of the vote count.

Barely two hours later, the kirthaane was virtually empty, with the owner heading for his car, leaving waiters to close the place as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared victory against his secular opposition rival, Kemal Kilicdaroglu.

“They endorsed the enemy of human rights, justice, liberty, ecological rights, women’s rights,” said one of the few remaining customers, asking that his name be changed to Arjen Kara due to security fears.

Looking around the empty tables, Kara said he understood why the clientele could barely stomach Erdogan’s victory speech as the incumbent told cheering supporters outside his home in Istanbul, “I will be here until I’m in the grave.”

“There is no hope for change, this change can’t happen with Erdogan,” stressed Kara. “I want change. But unfortunately, Erodgan’s policies were accepted by the majority of the country.”

“Free and unfair elections” is a term that’s being increasingly used to characterise polls that are manipulated to favour the incumbent. Other terms for this phenomenon include “illiberal democracies”, “competitive authoritarianism” and “electoral authoritarianism”.

With his victory in Sunday’s runoff, Erdogan was reelected to a post that he transformed after a razor-thin win in a 2017 referendum that scrapped a parliamentary system for an executive presidency.

In a Washington Post column published after the May 14 presidential first round, reputed US commentator Fareed Zakaria listed the ills, the bans, crackdowns, lack of judicial and media freedoms enabling Erdogan’s electoral victories. “What happened in Turkey,” said Zakaria on his CNN show, “highlights the latest and most disturbing trend in the rise of illiberal democracies.”

As Erdogan enters his third decade in power, the Turkish experience is viewed as a manual for the new depths of electoral authoritarians can plunge, using the will of the people justification without examination.

But in Diyarbakir, Turkey’s largest Kurdish-dominated city, the process began a long time, according to opposition politicians and activists. And it’s a textbook case in the costs of overlooking the center’s excesses in the periphery until it’s too late.

‘Kurdish Obama’ in jail, his party gets a new name

Turkey’s Kurds, who constitute an estimated 18% of the country’s population, went to the polls in the 2023 presidential and parliamentary elections with their most electable leader, Selahattin Demirtas, in prison.

Demirtas was a presidential candidate in the 2014 elections, when he came in third place just two years after his party, the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), was formed.

Dubbed the “Kurdish Obama”, Demirtas co-led his party to an impressive electoral achievement in the June 2015 general elections, when the HDP won 13% of the national vote, marking the first time that a pro-Kurdish party crossed the 10% threshold to enter Turkey’s parliament.

But a year later, Demirtas was arrested in a massive crackdown on government opponents and critics following a July 2016 failed coup attempt.

Despite a judgment by the European Court of Human Rights ordering his release, Demirtas has remained in jail for the past seven years.

In the 2023 elections, the HDP, was forced to field its candidates under a different name, the Green Left Party, to avoid the risk of being closed down by the Constitutional Court ahead of elections.

Legal harassment by a judiciary that lacks independence from the executive branch also forced Turkey’s main secular Republican Peoples’ Party (CHP) to bypass Istanbul’s popular mayor, Ekram Imamoglu, as a presidential candidate. The party instead picked Kilicdaroglu, a colourless former bureaucrat with a poor track record in wooing voters.

Comparing Imamoglu’s legal woes to those of her party, HDP-Green Left parliamentary-elect Ceylan Aksa noted, “if Imamoglu’s problems are a broken tap, ours is a flood”.

Aksa’s party is facing closure and is battling the case in the courts, which is more debilitating than proceedings against an individual, she explained. “What’s happening to Imamoglu will only affect himself, not his party. What happened to us is that we’re facing a five-year ban,” she said.

The HDP is accused of having ties to a banned Kurdish group, which it denies.

‘It can’t be called fair’

A 36-year-old former human rights activist, Aksa is one of eight Green-Left candidates to win seats in the 2023 elections.

Her campaign experience is a stark reminder of the challenges confronting opposition candidates in illiberal democracies.

“Campaigning was very exhausting. I lost 15 kilos in two months,” she revealed with a laugh. “I had no TV interviews or coverage. I had to go from village to village. If I had to go a village on top of a mountain with just five voters, I would go. But it makes things much more manual,” explained the parliamentary-elect from Diyarbakir province.

HDP-Green Left volunteers also faced constant harassment on the campaign trail, according to Abdulrezzak Memic, a janitor at a Diyarbakir-based company.

“We do all our campaign work under constant police surveillance and pressure. When we opened an election bureau in Yehisehiz [a Diyarbakir district], there was more police than local people. The police barricaded the area around the bureau, people couldn’t reach it,” he said.

“Last month, some of our friends – activists and lawyers were detained,” added Memic, referring to the arrest of more than 100 politicians, journalists, lawyers and activists just weeks before the May 14 presidential first round. “After they were detained, we wanted to make a press release, an announcement. But then the police arrested some of those volunteers.”

The constant crackdowns are a source of constant stress for the families of HDP volunteers, Memic explained. “My step-brother is a hardcore AKP supporter and volunteer,” he said, referring to Erdogan’s ruling party. “My family is not concerned about him. But for me, they’re always afraid,” he said with a booming laugh.

Despite the fears and crackdowns, Memic is not one to give up on what he sees as a just cause. “I’m a volunteer, I do my best. I believe in the party. I have to support the political party despite my family’s fears,” he maintained.

When it comes to the 2023 elections, his views are unequivocal. “This election was not free and fair, never, never,” he said, shaking his head emphatically. “How can we call it a fair election when the government uses all the tools, the capacity of the state for the campaign and the opposition party has no chance? At the same time, our people are so oppressed. It can’t be called fair.”