The Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been trying to forge alliances for 14 May elections with other Islamist parties in recent days, however his efforts have made some members of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its other allies uneasy.
Erdoğan’s first address for election cooperation was the Kurdish Islamist party Hüda-Par, which was founded on the ashes of the Kurdish Hizbullah, unrelated to Lebanese Hezbollah.
The extremist Sunni group which emerged in southeast Turkey (north Kurdistan) in 1985, just one year after the start of an insurgence led by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), is known to many in Turkey for the bloodshed and horror it caused in the country’s Kurdish-majority region during the 1990s.
At least 17,000 Kurds were massacred during this period by Turkey’s Gendarmerie Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism (JITEM) and Hizbullah. The ties between the violent and militant group and Turkey’s security apparatus were expressed by many at the time, including leading politicians, but were buried like many incidents of state crimes committed in southeast Turkey at the peak of clashes between the state and the PKK.
The group disappeared from public eye after the PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan was captured by Turkey in 1999 and re-emerged almost a decade later as a civil society group that culminated into the foundation of Hüda-Par in 2012.
The rivalry between Hüda-Par and the Kurdish freedom movement became obvious again during October 2014 protests across Turkey that were sparked by Ankara’s decision to close a southern border crossing while the northeastern Kurdish town of Kobane was under the Islamic State’s (ISIS) attack. In some of Turkey’s Kurdish-majority provinces, Hüda-Par backed security forces in clashes against the protestors.
When news regarding negotiations between the AKP and Hüda-Par broke out, many wondered how the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), AKP’s main ally, would react to this election partnership.
Embracing a form of Kurdishness that mainly makes reference to Islam, Hüda-Par have demands in its programme, including the establishment of a federal system in Turkey, Kurdish autonomy, approving Kurdish as the second official language and removing the word “Turkishness” from the constitution, which would simply be deemed “separatist” by nationalist hardliners.
While announcing his party’s support to Erdoğan earlier, the party’s leader Zekeriya Yapıcıoğlu said that Hüda-Par would expect to realise their demands in the party programme by establishing alliances.
The party’s programme also includes demands for re-establishment of a sex-segregated education system, employing women only in certain jobs “appropriate for their sex”, banning extramarital relationships, and preventing prostitution.
When asked during a television interview with Habertürk about the MHP’s possible reactions to the new alliance, Zekeriya Yapıcıoğlu, the leader of Hüda-Par, simply said: “Ask MHP’s sensitivities to the representers of MHP.” He only smiled, when asked whether Hizbullah is a terrorist organisation.
“As Hüda-Par, we want to be represented in the parliament. We want the president to continue for one more term,” Yapıcıoğlu said. According to rumours, 20 Hüda-Par candidates will run in elections under the AKP list.
Muharrem Sarıkaya, a columnist of Habertürk, wrote on Tuesday that the AKP had to note its reservations regarding Hüda-Par’s programme, after the officials of the MHP expressed their uneasiness about the ongoing negotiations.
However, the alliance with Hüda-Par has also disturbed some in the AKP. Hüseyin Kocabıyık, a lawmaker of the ruling party, said on Monday that through this alliance the AKP “will face losses across Turkey, while trying to gain a few seats from east and southeast Turkey”.
Özer Sencar, the founder of Turkey’s prominent pollster Metropolis, also thinks that Hüda-Par, which received only 0.31 percent of the votes in 2018 elections, will cause the AKP more harm than good.
Meanwhile, Numan Kurtulmuş, the deputy chair of the AKP, met with Hüda-Par officials on Monday to discuss the details of the partnership.
“What brought us together are our principles,” Kurtulmuş said after the meeting, adding that the final structure of the partnership will be shared with the public in the coming days.
Yapıcıoğlu, on the other hand, said that the negotiations will continue and Hüda-Par officials will visit AKP headquarters in the weekend.
“We still have not reached that point, but there are no problems in negotiations so far,” said Yapıcıoğlu, when asked whether his party has formally joined the People’s Alliance between the AKP and the MHP.
Erdoğan’s second target for election alliances was the New Welfare Party (YRP), founded by Fatih Erbakan, the son of Necmettin Erbakan, Turkey’s former prime minister and the leader of the former Welfare Party.
“We would like to see New Welfare Party join People’s Alliance for the upcoming elections,” said AKP deputy chair Binali Yıldırm after the first meeting between the two parties on 10 March.
However, the YRP also handed a 30-point list of demands to the AKP, which calls for abolishing the Law no. 6284 on the Protection of Family and Prevention of Violence Against Women, reviewing the Law no. 6251 on domestic violence against women and making amendments to prevent “perverse acts”, removing gender equality in the legislation, and outlawing adultery.
Derya Yanık, the Minister of Family and Social Services, was the first to react to the YRP’s demands.
“Since the adoption of the law, we have been developing our regulations studiously to improve its implementation. The spirit and the existence of the Law no. 6284 is critically important. It is unacceptable for us to even open a discussion on its existence,” Yanık said on Twitter.
The minister added that the struggle to prevent violence against woman is one of the red lines of the AKP. However, the same party only a year ago withdrew from the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence, known by many as the Istanbul Convention, which formed the basis of the Law no. 6284.
Despite Yanık’s protest, Doğan Aydal, one of the senior officials of the YRP, said in a television program that the AKP had seen no problem in their demands related to the law.
The party shared a long statement on Monday detailing the reasons for their objection to the law, claiming that the Law no. 6284 failed in protecting women against violence and should be replaced by measures that will prevent the breaking of families and reduce the divorce rates. The party called the law sexist, for portraying women as the vulnerable group and men as “strong, rich and brutal”.
“Is there any importance for a bad person to be a man or a woman,” the statement asked, adding that the law should also include articles on forms of violence committed by women against men.
