The Kurds are paying a heavy price for their electoral impudence. In Turkey’s June election the Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) passed the 10 per cent vote threshold to win parliamentary representation for the first time. And, in doing so, deprived President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development (AKP) party of the chance to lead a majority government for the first time in more than a decade and of his opportunity to rewrite the constitution strengthening the powers of the presidency. .
Coalition-building talks have gone nowhere as have even talks on an interim government. So Erdogan, quite cynically, has turned from engagement in a Kurdish peace process back to war, and called a new general election for November 1st. His party's share of the vote fell to 41 per cent in the election from 49 per cent in 2011, leaving it 18 seats short of the 276 needed to govern on its own.His hope is that a nationalist surge on the back of the fighting will give the AKP that majority. Polls suggest, however, that fresh elections are likely to produce another hung parliament – the AKP, in the latest poll has seen its vote rise by less than one percentage point and remains well short of majority territory.
Erdogan’s bloody political gamble has turned the country’s Kurdish southeast back into a war zone – a month on, some 65 Turkish soldiers and police officers, and more than 800 people the government dubiously claims are militants of the Kurdistan Workers’Party(PKK)have died in the resumed fighting of a slow-burning civil war that over the years claimed at least 40,000 lives.
The president has also alarmed allies in Nato by attcking the PKK whose forces in Syria are important allies of the anti-Assad coalition.
The resumption of the war aginst the Kurds and political uncertainty has knocked economic confidence in Turkey. The lira has hit a series of record lows, while consumer confidence in the €760 billion economy has slumped to its weakest in six years.