The majority of Kurdish voters in Türkiye will likely be endorsing President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the upcoming election because the community is aware of the risks and courageous steps he has taken to ease their age-old 'question,' experts told Daily Sabah.

Around 61 million people are eligible to vote in the May 14 presidential and parliamentary elections and the 15 to 20 million strong Kurdish population is considered to be the decisive factor in the race, whose outcome stands to be monumental for Türkiye.

Kurds will vote for Erdoğan more than they have in past elections because there is a great trust in him and the other candidates pose a great risk for Kurds, according to Mustafa Ekici, an Ankara-based Kurdish journalist.

Kurdish votes have been strategically significant since 2002 when Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AK Party) came to power but Ekici argued that they’re especially vital this year after the elections took on in 2007 the 50+1 format where the candidate that secures at least one more vote than 50% of the total is elected president, giving some 12 million Kurdish voters quite the sway.

Kurdish question

"While it’s inaccurate to claim Kurds vote uniformly as they have sub-factions, it’s a fact that they offer considerable support to Erdoğan and the AK Party," Ekici said and pointed to Erdoğan’s self-proclaimed status as "the leader to have settled the Kurdish issue" and initiatives the AK Party have pushed for in advancing Kurdish rights.

In light of its sprawling historical, social and political context and still reverberating painful memories, the Kurdish issue can be summed as the struggle of the Kurdish community, neglected by decades of nationalist administrations in post-Ottoman Türkiye, to achieve equal rights like using their own language and following the traditions of their ancestors.

An escalation of this struggle was distorted into violent form by the terror group PKK which has been using it as a pretext to legitimize its separatist agenda, the so-called Kurdish self-rule and the exploitation of the Kurdish community in Türkiye.

The PKK’s bloody insurgency has been responsible for the deaths of over 40,000 people in the country since the 1980s. The Kurdish residents in southeastern provinces suffered the brunt of their violence, losing children and loved ones to forced recruitment, their homes to bombing strikes, and regional peace to the PKK’s brutality and harsh state measures to contain it.

Particularly in the latter half of his rule, Erdoğan’s government has realized a series of reforms for the community, including the establishment of the first national Kurdish-language television network, ethnic Kurdish institutes, the introduction of Kurdish lessons in universities and other development projects.

For Ekici, Erdoğan "went against Türkiye’s ‘white elites’ and the military bureaucracy of the Kemalist establishment at the time and did something only a handful of politicians in the country’s history had done; he took a major risk with the Kurdish reconciliation process."

Erdoğan can "justifiedly boast himself a well-liked leader among Kurds because, beyond these risks, he enabled the Kurdish language and identity to gain legitimacy and ease on both a state and street level," Ekici argued.

From 2009 onward, the AK Party government launched a national unity project in order to resolve the Kurdish struggle without armed clashes, which continued with a "democratic expansion" phase and evolved into a reconciliation process by 2013.

Negotiations with the PKK, however, broke down by 2015 when the group resumed attacks, leading to a resurgence of violence across the southeast.

Most notably, the YPG, PKK’s Syrian affiliate, and the pro-PKK Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) officials, including its now jailed leader Selahattin Demirtaş, called for riots for Syria’s Ayn al-Arab – or Kobani – region that gave rise to clashes between pro-PKK and conservative Kurdish groups and security forces that left 31 dead, 350 injured and a slew of HDP members convicted of funneling funds to PKK terrorists for the protests.

There’s still countrywide support for the reconciliation efforts but the terror group continues disrupting the process.

"Although the process failed, these advances bolstered the sense of stately belonging among Kurds," according to another Kurdish expert Sinan Hakan, who previously served as a district mayor in the southeastern Van province and now provides consultancy to the provincial municipality.

In this period, Hakan went on to say, Erdoğan’s push "scrubbed away a policy of denial that had permeated in state codes" as he "took concrete steps to create a paradigm in the definition of citizenship and the fight against assimilation."

"All of this helped birth a longstanding bond between the Kurds and the AK Party," he said but added: "Claiming that the Kurdish issue is entirely over would be false if the problem itself lies with the Kurdish community’s strong cultural expectations that still persist."

Hakan conceded that due to a miscommunication problem arising from 2014 onward, the AK Party has been seeing its bond with Kurdish supporters loosening but "their loyalty and gratitude to Erdoğan himself remains significantly high for proving an Ankara-based solution that the entire country can agree on is possible."

Ekici too believes the Kurds will take into account Erdoğan’s bold venture with the said risks when they go to polls but, he said, "The PKK and the HDP’s provocations have stoked an antipathy towards Erdoğan in certain Kurdish circles."

Referring to a "belated sense of nationalism among some Kurds that they are now realizing will not do them any good", Ekici said, "They also recognize the rhetoric of the PKK’s white collars has nothing to do with the Kurdish struggle itself, just like in the way the HDP’s politics is merely about leftism and not defending Kurdish rights."

Erdoğan, who has had 15 victories in the past 21 years, has enjoyed considerable support from the Kurdish electorate since the early stages of his rule, most recently in the 2018 presidential election when he garnered 20-50% of the votes in Kurdish-majority provinces like Şanlıurfa, Mardin and even Diyarbakır, which overwhelmingly voted for the HDP in the national election.

Speaking last month in Diyarbakır, Erdoğan reiterated his call for building "a new civil, libertarian constitution that embraces the dreams of all people in this country."

"In this Türkiye, no one can be despised or marginalized due to their origin, belief, language, or attire," he promised.

HDP-PKK-Kılıçdaroğlu

Erdoğan’s strongest challenger Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the joint presidential contender of the six-party opposition alliance, has recently secured the HDP’s official blessing, despite criticism from partners and nationalist voter base, and even garnered the praise of several so-called PKK seniors who championed him in "ending the AK Party fascism."

Hakan predicted that a majority of the HDP’s base would adhere to the party’s call to support Kılıçdaroğlu but not out of faith in his policies and "only a sense of opposing AK Party-led People’s Alliance."

And while Kurdish numbers are a lot, Hakan believes it will be the "Turkish nationalist and conservatives who will have the general sway over the election outcome."

Ekici, however, reiterated that Kılıçdaroğlu and the other candidates constitute a risk "because Kurds will be voting with the example of Syria in mind where turbulence raised by a small minority has caused so much destruction and they would not want that for Türkiye."

The alliance between the HDP and Kılıçdaroğlu represents this risk due to their connection to the PKK, he concluded.

Opinion surveys by Optimar, ArtıBir and TEAM from the last week of April and early days of May showed a neck-to-neck race between Kılıçdaroğlu and Erdoğan, who was ahead of his rival by more than four points.

As for their parties, the AK Party covered the majority in almost every poll with at least 31% while the People’s Alliance grabbed 47.8% support, nearly 10 points ahead of the Nation Alliance.

The elections are taking place under the shadow of two massive earthquakes that leveled thousands of buildings and killed over 50,000 people in Türkiye’s southeast on Feb. 6.

Over 3 million people were displaced by the disaster but the government has been working to restore the quake-stricken provinces and Erdoğan vowed to deliver 319,000 homes within the year.

The sheer scale of the disaster and anger over a delayed response, however, has caused some to question the tendencies of the quake-hit electorate, especially in cities like Şanlıurfa and Gaziantep, which overwhelmingly supported Erdoğan in past elections.

Erdoğan himself acknowledged shortcomings in the early days of the disaster but assured the situation was quickly brought under control.

According to Hakan, the psychological effect due to the initial disorganization in the region shaved some of the support for the AK Party but intense recovery works have since softened that anger.

"A group that underwent such a traumatic disaster will seek trust and Erdoğan’s determined stance will be certainly effective on voters," he said.