Turkey's elections. Demirtaş promised to disarm the PKK

Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu's unannounced unannounced deal with the Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) put the Kurdish question on the list of the most important issues in the electoral contest.

Because the outlawed PKK appears to be at the heart of this deal, albeit ostensibly far from it, the debate over it goes beyond the electoral impact that the HDP's support for Kılıçdaroğlu will have in the presidential election.

I had previously touched on an article published in Al Jazeera Net on the tenth of April / April about the PKK's bets on the May 14 elections / May and the reasons that prompted it to support Kılıçdaroğlu. Because its conclusions were based on an analysis of the promises made by the Six-Party Alliance in the Joint Policy Document to adopt policies different in some respects from Erdogan's policies in the Kurdish case, and on an analysis of the HDP's electoral manifesto and explicit statements of support for Kılıçdaroğlu by prominent PKK leaders, these conclusions still need concrete data to reach a precise understanding of the deal, the PKK's relationship with it, and its potential impact on the future of the conflict between Turkey and the separatist organization.

However, recent statements by jailed former HDP co-chair Selahattin Demirtaş have provided important signals. In a tweet on April 14, Demirtaş promised to disarm the PKK if Erdogan is defeated in the elections and the opposition comes to power.

Although Demirtaş no longer has an official role in the party since his imprisonment, in practice he still plays a key leadership role in it and oversaw the making of the party's current strategy, especially with regard to the engineering of the deal with Kılıçdaroğlu, which makes the messages he issues from his imprisonment very important to understand the high expectations that the PKK and his successor have from these elections.

Given that both Kılıçdaroğlu and the HDP did not explicitly announce their agreement on the party's support for Kılıçdaroğlu in the presidential elections, one of the main motives for bringing out the deal in this way is aimed at reducing its negative effects on the six-party alliance, especially in terms of the possibility of losing the nationalist votes that oppose the alliance with the Kurdish party. Demirtaş's promise can be seen as an attempt to reassure voters worried about this deal and push them to view it from the perspective that it will contribute to a solution to the PKK insurgency.

For now, it will be difficult to gauge the potential impact of Demirtaş's promise on the mood of the Turkish voter in general and the nationalist votes on the opposition front in particular, because the determinants of electoral behavior are numerous and complex, but the assurances Demirtaş sought to provide do not effectively seem attractive to the nationalist voter and could even backfire.

While Kılıçdaroğlu has sought since reaching the unannounced deal with the HDP to avoid going into it, Demirtaş's statements reinforced the prevailing assumption that the PKK plays a key role in the alliance of utility between Kılıçdaroğlu and the HDP and that it seeks, through the balancing power of HDP voters, to condition support for Kılıçdaroğlu that if he wins the presidency, he will accept a radical change in the Turkish state's policies in the internal Kurdish question, especially in its struggle against the Workers at home and abroad.

One of the clear goals of the HDP and behind it the PKK is to grant local autonomy to Kurdish-majority areas, release PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, who has been detained for decades in Turkish prisons, and stop Turkish military operations against the group and its Syrian affiliate, the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG). Because Kılıçdaroğlu's acknowledgment of these demands would greatly damage his and the six-party alliance's support base with greater benefits than the opposition front aspires to, they are the most sensitive part of the deal.

There are some clear indications of the ground from which Kılıçdaroğlu and the HDP are starting their alliance, mainly focused on the promises made by the six-party alliance in the joint policy document to abandon the policy of guardian of mayors from which they were dismissed in past years because of their association with the PKK, as well as the pledge to stop the procedures for closing the HDP if the opposition comes to power, in addition to Kılıçdaroğlu's pledge to reintroduce the Kurdish issue in parliament.

Does Kılıçdaroğlu realize the danger of the bargaining game he entered into with the HDP and its successor, the PKK?

However, Demirtaş's promise to disarm the PKK opens the door to a debate about the price the group seeks in return for supporting Kılıçdaroğlu in the presidential election. An important conclusion can be drawn in this matter: if Demirtaş promises to disarm the PKK, the realistic assumption is that the delicate terms of the deal include fulfilling the most important demands of the HDP and PKK. It is important to view the HDP's case and strategy in the current elections as being based primarily on gains related to the overall Kurdish situation and going beyond the goal of toppling President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Justification for suspicion

Demirtaş's promise to work to disarm the PKK raises two important points:

• First of all:

Although this promise offers an alternative to the peace process that collapsed between Turkey and the PKK in the middle of the last decade, and did not last more than two years, part of the deception strategy practiced by the outlawed PKK, in which it appears as a party that wants to put an end to this conflict while in fact seeking to employ any peace with Turkey within the framework of its separatist project that transcends Turkish geography and is linked to the Kurdish state project that brings together the Kurds of Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran.

The PKK's coup against the peace process leaves no room for confidence in the promise made by Demirtas. Contrary to the disingenuous claims of Demirtaş and the PKK that the peace process collapsed because Erdogan abandoned it, it collapsed simply because it blocked the Kurdish separatist project in Turkey. This is reinforced by the rise of the Kurdish separatist project in Syria at a time when the peace process has collapsed, reinforcing the PKK's conviction that a return to violence is the only way to achieve the dream of a Kurdish state.

Erdogan's alliance with the nationalists may seem to be one of the reasons that prevented the success of the peace process, but it is a side by side and not directly, as the alliance of Erdogan and the nationalists emerged after the collapse of the peace process and not before. Moreover, even if Kılıçdaroğlu wants to revive the peace process with the PKK, he does not have enough influence over the PKK to change its separatist ideology, and he will in no way be able to cross the red lines imposed by Turkey's national security interests in the struggle with terrorism.

• Secondly:

If Demirtaş was able to convince the PKK to give up its weapons, why did he not play this role after the conclusion of the peace process between the party and the Turkish state. On the contrary, the Peoples' Party (HDP) led by Demirtaş engaged in reviving separatism in southeastern Turkey after the rise of the Kurdish separatist project in northern Syria, which reinforced the conviction that the HDP is only a political front for the PKK's separatist project. The fact that the PKK's dilemma is linked to the Kurdish separatist situation in Turkey and neighboring countries makes it difficult for Kılıçdaroğlu or any government that will lead Turkey after the elections to address it in the deceptive manner offered by the HDP. The HDP's primary function from the PKK's point of view is to play a political role in Turkey that serves its separatist ambitions.

Finally, the PKK's announcement to halt military operations inside Turkey until election day raised particular concern about the next day's strategy should the opposition lose the election. Because the environment created by the election may be more polarized if the opposition is defeated, the outlawed Workers' Party will see an opportunity to violently revive its rebellion against the Turkish state.

Does Kılıçdaroğlu realize the danger of the bargaining game he has entered into with the HDP and its successor, the PKK?