The upcoming local elections in Turkey on March 31 offer Turkey’s progressives—the social democratic main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy (DEM) Party—the opportunity to challenge the hegemony of the ruling conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP). A win would also bolster the chances of Istanbul’s incumbent CHP mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu, to succeed President Recep Tayyip Erdogan when his term expires in 2028, provided that they display a unity of purpose.
The upcoming local elections in Turkey on March 31 offer Turkey’s progressives—the social democratic main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy (DEM) Party—the opportunity to challenge the hegemony of the ruling conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP). A win would also bolster the chances of Istanbul’s incumbent CHP mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu, to succeed President Recep Tayyip Erdogan when his term expires in 2028, provided that they display a unity of purpose.
The outcome of the March 31 election in Istanbul, Turkey’s biggest city, will—as has been the case before—be decisive in shaping the course of Turkish politics. Erdogan himself rose to national prominence after serving as mayor of Istanbul in the 1990s.
Imamoglu was prepared to challenge Erdogan in the presidential election last year and enjoyed broad support not only in the CHP but among the opposition in general, but the CHP’s then-leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, imposed his own candidacy. Today, Imamoglu is the only credible opposition candidate. The CHP’s new leader, Ozgur Ozel, who unseated Kilicdaroglu as party leader last November, has said his party will not hesitate to field Imamoglu as its presidential candidate if he is reelected on March 31.
Imamoglu will be a strong contender to succeed Erdogan. He is a centrist social democrat and appeals to both conservatives and progressives. But the polls predict that the race between Imamoglu and his challenger from the AKP, Murat Kurum, is going to be close—and a loss would undermine Imamoglu’s future presidential prospects. Some analysts suggest that the incumbent could be facing defeat, given the loss of support from a key constituency, the Kurds.
Critically, in 2019, Imamoglu enjoyed the endorsement of the Kurdish political movement. The Kurdish voters were the key to his election. Istanbul is home to the largest Kurdish population in Turkey, approximately 2 million or 12 percent of the city’s population. This time, the pro-Kurdish DEM Party has fielded its own, co-mayoral candidates, Meral Danis Bestas and Murat Cepni.
The right-wing nationalist Good Party that supported Imamoglu in 2019 and was allied with the CHP in the presidential and parliamentary elections last year has also broken ranks with the CHP that has made a turn to the left under Ozel and is running an independent campaign. Yet while the defection of Turkish nationalists can prove as costly, the Kurdish defection from Imamoglu has a deeper significance beyond electoral politics. It bespeaks—the CHP’s leftward turn on social and economic issues notwithstanding—the impasse of progressive politics in Turkey.
Imamoglu needs to bring divergent political and ethnic constituencies together to win Istanbul—and would have to do the same to succeed Erdogan. A failure by Imamoglu to sway the Kurdish voters and align the constituency of the DEM Party with the CHP base will demonstrate that progressive unity is beyond reach. Imamoglu needs the Kurdish vote not only to win, but moreover to embody democratic change.
Promisingly, the new CHP leadership has charted a social democratic course, embracing the labor movement and calling for reforms that address poverty and inequality. This is in sharp contrast to his predecessor, Kilicdaroglu, who disastrously distanced himself from the left and embraced right-wing policies and partners. Kilicdaroglu struck a deal with the far-right Victory Party in the run-up to the presidential election last year and vowed to keep removed Kurdish elected officials (accused of “terrorist” links) out of office.
Ozel has condemned the suppression of the Kurds’ democratic rights. While Kilicdaroglu forged an alliance with five right-wing parties that excluded Kurds and socialists, Ozel has initiated an electoral alliance with the socialist Labor Party of Turkey (TIP) and unsuccessfully sought a similar agreement with the DEM Party.
But Ozel has failed to establish his authority over his party, and his colleagues across the country are openly defying him. On March 6, the CHP’s mayoral candidate in the province of Afyonkarahisar, Burcu Koksal, vowed that if she is elected, the doors of the municipality would be open to all parties except the pro-Kurdish DEM Party. Ozel, who was present when Koksal—who is also CHP deputy group chairperson in the parliament—delivered her anti-Kurdish remarks, called them “a minor slip of the tongue.”
But Imamoglu recognized that Koksal had effectively torpedoed his chances to secure the Kurdish vote and demanded that she “either look for a new job or a new party.” The polls pointed to a close race in Istanbul already before the statement, and it elicited a strong reaction from the DEM Party’s Bestas, who said that it amounts to “fascism.”
The persistence of Turkish supremacist nationalism in the CHP’s ranks is undermining the party’s credibility as a progressive force and disabling the left-wing unity that should otherwise have been within reach. The DEM Party insists that it seeks not just to secure the political and cultural rights of Turkey’s Kurds, but that it equally aspires to bring about a broader democratic and progressive change of Turkish society. The DEM Party’s local election manifesto for Istanbul lays out a progressive agenda, including promises of participatory democracy through the establishment of neighborhood and city assemblies, promotion of women’s participation in urban planning, and the rule of labor.
Selahattin Demirtas, the former co-chair of the previous iteration of the pro-Kurdish party, known as the HDP, who has been imprisoned since 2016, in 2021 called on Turkey’s left-wing forces to form a “strong left bloc” to build democracy after the rule of the AKP. Demirtas argued that democracy was going to elude Turkey in the absence of the left and “the voice of the labor.” “A strong left bloc can be built without considering personal and party interests,” Demirtas insisted. Yet Demirtas, who remains a powerful voice in Kurdish politics, has not expressed any interest in the left turn of the CHP.
Indeed, Demirtas no longer proposes that the party join a left bloc with social democrats and socialists. Instead, he recommends that the DEM Party position itself as a third force, equidistant to the AKP and the CHP, and urges it to engage in talks with the AKP to solve the Kurdish issue and to democratize Turkey. “I don’t know if there is meeting traffic between the DEM Party and the AKP, but if there is not, this is a great deficiency for both parties,” he recently said.
Presumably to endear himself to Erdogan, Demirtas paid homage to the Islamic identity of Turkey, saying, “What defines us in these lands is Islamic civilization.” “A part of Turkey’s socialists are unaware of this, and due to their ignorance, they cannot reach out to society,” he professed when he delivered his defense at the last hearing at his trial in December 2023.
It is indeed true that the Turkish left has historically been hampered by its overzealous commitment to secularism, which has alienated the popular masses from it. But Demirtas’s statements about Islam suggest that he seeks something else than a reinvention of the left to broaden its popular appeal. He is not calling for a Muslim left. Instead, he seems to have given up on the left and concluded that Kurdish interests can only be furthered by aligning with Islamic conservatism.
It’s reasonable to assume that Demirtas’s shift is prompted by a recognition that the AKP seems to be entrenched in power and that the Kurds consequently have no alternative but to seek an understanding with Erdogan. It may also be that the deal that Kilicdaroglu struck with the far right last year convinced Demirtas that the CHP cannot be trusted.
In a similar vein, Ahmet Turk, a veteran of the Kurdish movement in Turkey, earlier this year said that Erdogan is the only leader who can solve the Kurdish question, because he “has taken control of all state institutions.”
“But if the CHP were to attempt such a thing, its project would be shattered,” Turk said. Indeed, this was what happened the last time the CHP attempted to challenge authoritarian right-wing power. When a CHP government in the 1970s tried to promote economic equality and expand labor rights, forces in the Turkish state struck back violently and ended the attempt. However, Erdogan is not omnipotent. His attempt between 2013 and 2015 to solve the Kurdish issue met with stiff resistance from within the state establishment, which may in turn explain why the attempt was aborted.
Yet it is increasingly clear that a strong current in the Kurdish political movement is pinning its hopes on a revival of some version of the old feudal deal between the Turkish state and Kurdish tribal leaders. Under it, from the 1950s to the late 1970s, Kurdish tribal leaders were by and large left socially and economically in control of the country’s Kurdish region in return for delivering the votes of their tribes to the ruling conservative parties, the AKP’s predecessors. That was the reason the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) began as a Marxist revolutionary movement in opposition both to Kurdish feudalism and the Turkish state in the 1970s.
Today, the Kurds legitimately demand that election results are respected and elected Kurdish mayors are not thrown out of office and into prison—as Turk was after he was reelected mayor of the province of Mardin in 2019. Turk was dismissed but not arrested, as he was in 2016. Of 65 mayors elected in 2019, 59 were removed from office or imprisoned, or both.In return, the Kurdish political movement is not offering Erdogan its votes, but nonetheless its services by depriving his main challenger of votes.
Yet it is unlikely that the Kurds will be rewarded. Erdogan and his ally Devlet Bahceli, the leader of the far-right Nationalist Movement Party, are unlikely to acquiesce to Kurdish party rule in the Kurdish region as long as the challenge posed by the PKK continues to haunt the Turkish state. As PKK affiliates—armed and protected by the United States—have established a de facto state in Rojava across the border in northern Syria, Turkey will remain intransigent on the Kurdish issue.
DEM Party mayors who are elected on March 31 risk being removed from office just as their predecessors were after the local elections in 2019. The strategy of relying on Erdogan is bound to end in yet another disappointment for the Kurdish political movement, shattering its core political project.
A democratic solution to the Kurdish issue—without which full democracy in Turkey will remain elusive—depends on Turkish and Kurdish progressives making common cause. Yet the DEM Party cannot reasonably be expected to withdraw its co-mayoral candidates from the Istanbul race and endorse the CHP’s presidential front-runner unless the CHP lives up to its social democratic pledges and purges anti-Kurdish nationalism from its ranks.
At stake is not only the outcome of the Istanbul election, as important as it is. If narrow-minded nationalism prevails among Turkish progressives, the authoritarian AKP regime—which has run the country for more than 20 years—will become entrenched and outlast Erdogan.
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