In the Kurdish southeast local government means local autonomy

With general elections not scheduled until June 2015, and Turkey’s national political scene lurching from crisis to crisis, it has become a commonplace to say the local elections of March 30 are a national referendum.
But what that referendum is about varies from region to region. In Western Turkey, the election has been reduced- certainly in the eyes of international media – to one of democracy versus dictatorship. The opposition has sought, and the ruling AK Party has embraced, a contest over whether the AK can maintain control of the prized Istanbul and Ankara mayoralties despite mounting corruption scandals and angry street protests.
In the Southeast, on the other hand, the local elections have become national in a different way. The peace process between the government and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) is stalled. Two weeks ago the civilian wing of the PKK, the Group of Communities of Kurdistan (KCK), issued a carefully worded statement saying the AK was no longer an “interlocutor” in the peace process –dissatisfaction that stops just short of an explicit threat of return to violence. The movement is cautious because the cessation of hostilities has been accompanied by some concessions to Kurdish rights and a some economic growth. A return to arms would not of itself be popular.
Instead of confrontation the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) which represents the Kurdish movement, is running on a poster campaign of “free identity and self-governance.” The party appears to be shifting its strategy from achieving a national level deal to incremental and irreversible gains through local self-governance. By controlling mayoralties in the Southeast, the BDP will be able to pursue de facto decentralisation.
The strategy is encouraged by a major change in Turkey’s convoluted system of local governance. Under a new law passed in 2012, the boundaries of Istanbul’s metropolitan municipalities (Büyükşehirler) were expanded to match the boundaries of their provinces. The law also nearly doubled the number of büyükşehirs from 16 to 30. Thus the mayoralties in 30 of Turkey’s cities are now quasi-governorships, as mayors will have elected authority over large rural and exurban districts surrounding the capital cities. These changes mean that many electorates across the country are dramatically larger and demographically different than in previous years. While these boundary changes elsewhere may benefit the AK Party, in the Southeast they could enable the BDP to move from being a party of opposition to being a party of government across a contiguous stretch of the Southeast.
As a sign of how important the local elections are for the BDP, the party’s candidate for Diyarbakir is party co-chair Gültan Kışanak, one of the Kurdish movement’s best-known national politicians. She says following the elections the büyükşehir council in Diyarbakir will act as “a local parliament,” responsible for all decisions in the province. She says the BDP’s focus on the local is important “both to strengthen local governance in opposition to the center, and as a means of strengthening participatory mechanisms within the city itself.”
The strategy faces two main challenges: for one, Turkey’s two-tiered local government system remains in place, with practically colonial appointed provincial governors (valis) continuing to control the army and police at the direction of the central government. Thus even in the staunchest BDP büyükşehir of Diyarbakir, Ankara will maintain authority over key state functions, not to mention allocation of Ankara’s considerable budgets.  Second, outside of its core provinces, the BDP remains an opposition party closely associated with the leftism and Kurdish nationalism of the PKK. The BDP sent Osman Baydemir, the popular mayor of neighboring Diyarbakir, to contest Urfa’s election. Baydemir, who is running against the AK Party-appointed vali of the province, sees local governance as a solution to Turkey’s notorious problems of sluggish development. “Trabzon can solve its issues faster than Ankara can. Edirne can solve its issues much faster than Ankara can,” he told a group of visiting journalists from P24. “Five bureaucrats come to Urfa from Ankara, they don’t know Urfa, they go to a hotel, they sleep there, they wake up there, they make a neigborhood development plan, Ankara approves it.”
But Baydemir faces an uphill climb in Urfa, which has a history of support for political Islam and a relatively low proportion of ethnic Kurds compared to Diyarbakir. Local journalists told P24 that although Baydemir’s campaign had been impressive, and may lay the groundwork for a stronger future BDP presence in Urfa, this election would assuredly go to the AK.
Other than securing Diyarbakir under BDP co-chair Kışanak, the BDP’s other gain will likely be in Mardin, where the büyükşehir now includes almost five times as many people as the eponymous capital city once did. Here, as well, the BDP has brought out a heavy hitter– Ahmet Türk, the former chair of the Democratic Society Party (DTP) before it was banned in 2009. Although now technically running as an “independent” due to a ban on party affiliation thanks to the DTP case, there is no question about Türk’s role: his campaign posters feature BDP colors and the BDP slogan, and Türk was a featured speaker at Diyarbakir’s raucous pro-PKK Newroz celebration on March 21. Mardin’s expansion to include rural and exurban areas should increase the share of the Kurdish vote and allow the Kurdish movement to govern two adjacent provinces.
The BDP’s efforts to capitalize on the büyükşehir law show how the dominant discussion of Turkey may not always reflect local realities. Even as the AK Party is aggressively attacking the underpinnings of liberal democracy at the national level, in the Southeast, at least, local governance may be gaining in strength.

*Nate Schenkkan is a Program Officer for Freedom House. 

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