Many were taken by surprise by the announcement of the Kurdish HDP’s to run as a party in the upcoming 2014 elections, as opposed to running as independent candidates, which it has done until now. Running as independent have been the Kurdish political movement in Turkey’s way of circumventing the draconian ten percent threshold, which excludes parties from representation in the Turkish parliament if it fails to win more than tern percent of the national vote share.

The HDP candidate Selahattin Demirtas did receive nearly 10 percent of the vote in the last (presidential) elections, but given it’s 2011 vote share of ~7 percent, and opinion polls putting HDP at roughly 6-8 percent, it seems a rather tall order to expect HDP to pass the ten percent threshold needed for any parliamentary representation. Most likely it will fall below that, and if it has then run as a party, it will not receive any votes at all. These votes will then almost surely fall into the hands of the ruling AKP, likely giving it the supermajority needed to rewrite the constitution. In this case, the Kurds are dependent on the AKP to use its borrowed Kurdish votes to run through the institutional changes needed to accommodate Kurdish preferences. Failure to do so could result in another lost opportunity for Kurds to achieve institutional equality in Turkey.

As such, the HDP strategy is quite a gamble.

Several people more qualified than me have now written about this (see for example, recent articles by Amberin Zaman’s in Al-Monitor, as well as Gareth Jenkins in The Turkey Analyst).

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