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The ongoing peace process between the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AK Party) government and the Kurdish left, represented by the Kurdistan Workers' Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, PKK) and the Democratic Party of the Peoples (Halkların Demokratik Partisi, HDP), the neo-successor of the former Peace and Democracy Party (Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi, BDP), is an extraordinary achievement. After over thirty years of armed clashes between Turkey's civilian governments/military forces and the PKK's paramilitary groups, both sides have agreed to end the fighting and permanently establish peace. Despite the recent corruption charges against the AK Party government and the AKP-Gülen split within the conservative right, the peace process retains the commitment of its major actors: the AKP, BDP-HDP and PKK. The conflict between the AK Party government and Fethullah Gülen's group (Cemaat) has far from undermined the dedication to peacemaking. The purpose of this article is to shed light on the politics and rhetoric of the Kurdish left with legal, parliamentary status, namely the BDP-HDP political line, and explain how it can contribute to Turkey's democratization from an objective perspective.
Though the AK Party and the BDP-HDP line come from anti-establishment roots, the two political traditions do not have much in common. The AK Party defines itself as a ‘conservative democratic' movement. Although ‘conservative democracy' sounds like a novel term, it is hardly a new concept in Turkish politics. The term marks a reinterpretation of an existing political tradition in Turkey's long-standing center-right and a break away from the old-fashioned religious populism of the former Islamist right. For instance, while the former Islamist right perceived the EU as a Christian club, the AK Party embraced the Republican project of integration with the West and Turkey's EU membership process. Furthermore, the AK Party amalgamated the pro-Islamist and pro-Western foreign policy schools by embracing the idea that Turkey belongs to both Islamic and European civilizations and could represent the Islamic civilization within the EU.
In contrast, the BDP-HDP line represents a progressive, left-wing party tradition. An observer party member of the Socialist International, the former BDP was a secular party with no defense of traditional morality, religious principles or family values. Nevertheless, the Kurdish left-wing parties have been regarded as regional/ethnic movements due to the fact that their priority has been the rights and liberties of Kurdish people in Turkey. On the one hand, the Kurdish left party tradition started out as a regional movement and concentrated in the Kurdish-populated east and southeast regions of Turkey. On the other hand, it has recently embraced a wider spectrum of issues including equal citizenship, democratization, freedom of expression, social justice, gender equality, ecology and labor rights. Furthermore, the BDP-HDP is the only parliamentary actor to have actively defended LGBT rights in Turkey.
The BDP recently founded a new group, the Democratic Party of the Peoples (HDP), for the long run purpose of creating an all-inclusive, umbrella party that would not give the image of a Kurdish regionalist party or ‘a party of Kurds.' The BDP and the HDP ran separately in the March 2014 local elections in the East and West respectively. After the local elections, the BDP dissolved itself and joined the HDP, while a group decided to maintain the old party by changing its official title to Democratic Regions Party (Demokratik Bölgeler Partisi, DBP) as a regional cadre party for the long-run purpose of ‘democratic autonomy' of Turkey's Kurdish-populated regions. The HDP is expected to become a party of Turkey while the DBP is not planned to contest local or general elections. In the first presidential elections of Turkey, The HDP nominated its co-president Demirtaş, who raised the party's traditional 6-7 percent in Turkey to over 9 percent, which was a breakthrough in the electoral history of the Kurdish left-wing party tradition.