There are two crucial results collecting curiosity in the upcoming June elections. The first one is whether AK Party will receive enough votes to pass to a Presidential system. As for the other, it’s whether HDP will exceed the threshold. In other words, there is a threshold issue for both parties.

Even if AK Party fails to exceed the Presidential system threshold, when we consider that they will retain the rulership, passing the threshold does not represent a vital importance for them like it does for HDP.

The essential matter that should be discussed is; HDP’s popularization, as pointed out by the baggage equation, and, to where and how the politics they conduct over Kurdish nationalism will evolve.  If they are willing to open and transform, then the other question will be; in which direction will the evolution and the tools for that be pointing?

There is/was two different trends that are/were kept outside the political system in Turkey. One of them is the problematic relation of the political system, which is represented by the Refah Party, with the system. The process is known to all; the community and worldview represented by the Refah Party was being regarded dangerous from the point of the system. As a necessity of “Turkey’s unique conditions”, there were some obstacles for this wide community. This demand of the Refah Party, which announced their intention for consenting and making peace with the system following February 28th, didn’t get a response. When the guardianship regime preferred reading this tendency backwards and oppressed it, the country become unmanageable after a political party had been shut down. As a result, as the different congregations and formation cooperated for the first time, the process, which started with AK Party, and the traditional National Vision base, had experienced an intra-system transformation. Also, as the center, which became unmanageable, reinforced itself with a new communal base, it required the segments, from which they were excluded, to integrate. Crudely, the conservative segment left their mark on the post-Kemalist period.

The Refah Party’s community’s “this state is already ours” approach being constantly alive in the unconsciousness has been an important factor in the Refah Party’s success in adapting to the system easily and in a short time, despite being excluded by it.

It wasn’t going to be hard for the system to embrace the government, by making some symbolical alterations, opening a place in the center for conservatives and thus mobilizing this consciousness. As a result of the “Muslimism” politics, which we previously used, and the intra-system elite change it corresponds to, there wasn’t much strain.

In return, HDP is the child of a bloody process, which adopted armed violence as a method…. Despite countless peace statements, they are carrying the baggage of a bloody past and doing politics under the shadow of this. It could even be said that, similar to how their politics is not independent from this armed structuring, this is a party taken hostage by arms.

Comprehensiveness of a nationalist-based political movement, which bases on another discrepancy of Kurdish ethnicity, is not as easy as it’s assumed. In order for this to happen, they have to become an independent political subject, by getting out of the shadow of arms, which seems impossible at this stage. If we presume that HDP wriggled out of the armed structure and transformed into an independent movement, or, when we think that they normalize themselves after the arms are out of the equations, they encounter an important fork in the road. Will they practice politics over ethnicity, or turn their view into a political policy, which catches the agenda of Turkey and risk developing alternative politics over this?

As they are now, they don’t seem to comprehend the difference between being an intra-system party and being the party of Turkey. Even, they are paying no attention to it. The political mind represented by the Refah Party had lost the difference between being an intra-system party and developing alternative politics that surround Turkey. The ones, who believe that HDP is the representative of liberal politics that embrace Turkey, are showing the support from the left-wing segment as a justification. However, the ones, who are expecting that the nationalist politics, which is based on a certain ethnicity, of the left-wing intelligentsia within HDP will be transforming into a language that embraces Turkey, are mistaken. Likewise, it could easily be said that anger of the marginal left-wing groups toward the values and culture of these lands and the alienation in their nature is trying to push HDP to extreme ends more than normalizing them.

Now in Turkey, the point in question is a left-wing representation which cannot become normalized, since it is focused on satisfying their ideological fantasies, rather than speaking with the community and producing embracing politics, and is feeling the rage of being defeated. This segment is displaying the image of satisfying the romanticism of an armed struggle, and, of having taken the political mind of a marginality psychology, which cannot normalize against the wide masses that cannot understand them, as a hostage.

Is pulling symbolical transfers from the right and left wing enough for HDP to make peace with the center? To put it better, will their peace with the center be enough for them to become the party of Turkey? This is the essential question.

Because the justifications of a political movement, which constitutes its existence over ethnicity nationalism, can be understood to some extent. The removal of nation-state mentality victimhood, and giving a political struggle for this cause, is a valid necessity not only for HDP, but for all politicians who possess justice and moral responsibilities. However, the “becoming Turkish” threshold of a Kurdish movement cannot be handled independently from its relation with the “past” baggage on its back. In order to embrace all the segments in this country, especially for a movement that is bound to ethnicity sensitivity, the relation with religion will be an arbiter. If the left-wing Kurdish movement, which has problematic and distant relation with religion, takes on the responsibility of the religion baggage of the left-wing, liberal left and socialists, then it’s clear that it will turn into a marginal movement.

HDP performance in the upcoming elections is a candidate to be an arbiter milestone for not only the party politics, but also the relations between the community represented by the party and the country’s future. What’s important here is not only dragging the elites of the political movement into the system, but also seeing whether the community, which they are practicing politics with and which had been ripped away from the general community, will return home spiritually and emotionally. Even though the center has many different arguments, the essential thing here is to see whether the relations between the communal segments, which show the foresight not to be pushed into a civil war, become normalized despite all kinds of attempts, and to see on which pensive political platform this normalization will take place.

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